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Question Description

Customer Relationship Management

What is customer relationship management?  What steps are involved?  Describe an experience as a consumer, either positive or negative, and how the experience either supported or contradicted the steps involved in the customer relationship management process. Incorporate concepts and examples from this week’s lecture. 

Discussion 2

Message Theme

What is a message theme?  What role does a message theme play in an advertising campaign?  Provide an example from your personal experiences of a theme that particularly impressed you. Incorporate concepts and examples from this week’s lecture.

Here is the Lecture

Week Five Lecture
 

Customer Relationship Management
Sometimes the only differentiating feature among competitors is the relationship and buying experience between the organization and its customer. Organizations are implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) models in hopes of developing long-term relationships with their customers. Although organizations have made an effort to form long-term relationships with their customers for decades, today's CRM models implement the use of technology to "effectively increase the acquisition and retention of profitable customers by selectively initiating, building, and maintaining appropriate relationships with them" (Payne & Frow, pp. 135-136). It is this effort that can help an organization establish such a relationship with its customers that they feel like a valued and integral part of the organization. As a result, customers can remain loyal and continue to purchase with the organization for many years.

Message Themes

Week 5 discusses creative copy writing along with strategic writing. How does an advertiser determine which words to use in such a manner as to appeal to a defined consumer segment? How does the advertiser decide the underlying message in the copy that will have the highest probability of affecting consumer buyer behavior?

One theory used by advertisers is from psychologist Abraham Maslow: the hierarchy of needs. Although Maslow’s original model of needs was five levels, marketing has combined those into four levels: physiological needs; safety needs; social needs; and personal needs (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2008). If the advertising copy written appeals to filling one of those needs which are intrinsic to humans, then the content of the message can help create a want!

What does this mean? For instance, we need food to meet the physiological need for hunger. But do we need dry crackers or caviar? We need to feel safe and protect our loved ones – has anyone noticed the extent to which advertising goes to tell us about the safety features of a product? We need to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging to meet social needs – has anyone noticed the ads for clothing, dieting, colognes, perfumes, autos, and on and on appeal to this need? Drive this special car and you will get all the girls! Or get all the boys!

Advertising is written in such a manner as to influence our wants – how the need is filled. We want a specific brand to fill our needs, and this is where the creative writing is focused.

Research

With the availability of more and more sophisticated methods of segmenting the population and tracking the tastes of individuals and groups within the population, market segmentation and target marketing have become the core methods for successful marketers to bring their products efficiently to the attention of those prospects most likely to become buyers.  A cornerstone for the successful development and implementation of target marketing programs is the ability to identify your company's and product's competitive differentiations and capitalize on these differentiations with a complementary positioning strategy.

Quantitative research methods include surveys of all types:  written, telephone, web-based, mail, etc.  The trademark of this type of research is that you can put a number or percentage to something.  For example, “60% of the people surveyed said they would buy Orange Coke” (wonder what that would taste like?).  This is true of all of the quantitative surveys you may have completed:  new car dealer survey, employee satisfaction, a simple comment card at the local restaurant, or your student end of course survey at Ashford.

Qualitative methods, on the other hand, are not designed to express a percentage based on responses when the research is complete.  In fact, they are not statistically valid.  However, this does not make them any less important than their quantitative counterpart.  This method involves listening to what our customers (or non-customers) think about us, a new product, or a new advertising campaign.  Focus groups and interviews are examples of qualitative methods (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2010).  By using a focus group, a marketer can find out what people think specifically about an idea.  In the Orange Coke example, the participants might taste the product, and then tell an unbiased moderator what they think about it.  Rather than to say “yes, I like it,” in a focus group, we can ask more in depth questions about why they like it, what it tastes like to them, how it makes them feel, etc.

There are two other categories of market research:  primary and secondary. The best way to describe the difference between the two has to do with who pays for and controls the research.  If a company conducts a telephone survey (a quantitative method), decides what questions to ask, and pays for the survey, either by using its own staff or hiring an outside firm, then it is primary research.  It is customized for a specific purpose.  Secondary research involves sources that already exist, but can still provide valuable information for marketing.  Research that you have been doing on the internet in all of your classes is an example of secondary research.  There could be an industry survey conducted that provides important information, but your company did not pay for it or have input into the design.  This is also secondary research.
 
A solid market research plan involves a mix of primary and secondary data, as well as qualitative and quantitative data.  It also includes something that is often overlooked as market research:  internal data.  Much of my time in market research involved analyzing customer data from our internal databases.  For example, a review of this data can reveal:  where do our patients live, what doctor admitted them into the hospital, what was their diagnosis, insurance plan, age, race, or sex.  How many of you have purchased something from Toys R Us and they ask you for your zip code or phone number?  This is a form of market research of their current customer base.  All of these can build a foundation for a solid marketing plan, and they also play a part in a marketing audit.


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