Month: October 2010

Customer satisfaction may act more positively than advertising. As customers who use a particular company’s product get satisfied, the customer may spread a positive word to the society. And the society, in turn, might get interested on its product and eventually purchase it. On the other hand, a negative spread of word can be very deleterious for the firm, and is considered as one of the attitudes that firms must avoid in order to succeed in the market.

           The way Stella & Chewy’s is handling with its complaints is becoming an issue. It carefully examines any complaints related to their products and tries to deliver greatest value as possible.

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/23/smallbusiness/profiting_from_customer_complaints.fsb/index.htm

Consumers purchase goods or services when they perceive that the money that they are paying for is an appropriate amount for the value that they get from the goods or services.  In some cases, the firm tries to identify the value that the customer puts on their products or services and charges the customers accordingly. For example, some customers might attribute a high value on staying at Hyatt Hotel because it provides high levels of service, and convenience. When Hyatt Hotel finds out that the customers are putting a high value on the services and products that they provide, Hyatt might charge them a reasonable price.

As I was looking on the choices I have for my winter break, the value-related readings of marketing course came to my mind. Checking the prices of hotels in Whistler and Cancun, I was left in a humungous dilemma. The prices that I had to pay for a night in those places exceeded what I was expecting, in other words, many individuals were placing a higher value on staying at those hotels located in Whistler and Cancun than what I did. Looking at those prices, I was surprised that all the contents that we learned in marketing course were valid and that “Marketing is everywhere”.

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A company’s logo can be used as a positioning tool. Nowadays, symbol became very important factor for both potential buyers and the company itself. Logo helps consumers to easily identify the manufacturer of the product, and it also might give the buyers some sense of pride by using that particular item. The symbols also help to “create a position for the brand that distinguishes it from its competition” (Grewal and Levy 160). There have been many companies that changed their logo, and changing the company’s logo is often viewed as gambling. It can ameliorate company’s image perceived by the customers or it can deteriorate its image. The Gap updated its 20-year old logo to a simpler logo in which it has a smaller blue box on top of “p” in Gap. This sudden change in its logo caused many discrepancies among The Gap’s consumers. While some advocated this new change, some others even stated that “if this logo is brought into the clothing [store] I will no long[er] be shopping with the Gap. Really a bummer because 90% of my clothing has been purchased there in the last 15+ years.” To pacify the disappointment of the customers, Gap immediately responded to the arguments and asked for feedbacks.

From this example, we can easily denote how logos play crucial role in a company’s positioning strategy.

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/08/news/companies/gap_logo/index.htm

Bibliography

Grewal and Levy. Marketing. 2nd. McGraw-Hill, 2009. 160

Normally, when people think about marketing, one simple and eminent notion comes to their mind, “marketing is simply selling values to the public”. However, marketing involves more complex and costly activities. Those activities are data collection, observation, in-depth interview, and surveys, just to name a few. Since marketing is primarily focused on consumer’s needs, much of the data collections are also focused on consumers.  Due to this fact, marketers always have to pay very close attention when doing market research because in some way the marketers might harm consumers by collecting data unethically. The most recently well-known marketing scandal was selling customer information to a third party.

Videotaping customers raises another question of whether observing customers’ actions for marketing use is ethical or unethical. Doing such observation of customers’ actions might help to better understand how consumers’ tastes differ according to their age, sex, etc. “In some cases, researchers obtain consent from the consumers they are watching and videotaping; in other cases, they do not. The ethical dilemma for marketing researchers centers around whether using observational techniques in which the subjects are not informed that they are being studied, like viewing customers in a mall or a retail store, violates the rule of fair treatment. Observing uninformed consumers very well may lead to important insights that would not otherwise be discovered” (Grewal and Levy 175).  Although many customers wouldn’t care whether they are being videotaped or not, some might actually care that they are being watched by someone. Do you believe that this type of marketing is ethical?

Bibliography

Grewal and Levy. Marketing. 2nd. McGraw-Hill, 2009. 175