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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

There is the solved assignment of “Define Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”. The MB0046 (Marketing Management) assignment has been solved for SMU MBA assignment. You may view International Market Entry Strategies and Product Life Cycle also.

In the marketing world managers quite often says ‘retaining customer is more important than acquiring one’. We will examine the importance of this sentence. The organization uses communications tools to make their product and brand aware among the consumer. It uses its supply chains and human resources to sell their products. Each stage costs for the company. In this competitive world organizations want to reduce the cost and develop the database which helps in creating loyalty programs. There it is very essential for the organizations to use software to pile up big database of customer. Many Indian companies like Infosys, Wipro and others started offering CRM software to companies.

Definitions of Customer Relations Management (CRM):

Bery and Parasurman define CRM as “attracting, developing and retaining customer relationships.”

In industrial marketing, Jackson defines CRM as “marketing oriented toward strong, lasting relationships with individual accounts.”

Doyle and Roth define CRM as “the goal of relationship selling is to earn the position of preferred supplier by developing trust in key accounts over a period of time.”

The sequence of activities for performing relationship marketing would include developing core services to build customer relationship, customization of relationship, augmenting core services with extra benefits, and enhancing customer loyalty and fine-tuning internal marketing to promote external marketing success.

Christopher considers relationship marketing as “a tool to turn current and new customers into regularly purchasing clients and then progressively moving them through being strong supports of the company and its products to finally being active and vocal advocates for the company.”

From the above definitions, it could be concluded that Customer Relationship Management refers to all activities directed towards establishing, developing and sustaining long lasting, trusting, win-win, beneficial and successful relational exchanges between the focal firm and all its supporting key stakeholders.

CRM is not a new concept but an age-old practice, which is on the rise because of the benefits others, especially in the present marketing scenario. So, CRM today is a discipline as well as a set of discrete software and technology which focuses on automating and improving the business process associated with managing customer relationships in the area of sales, marketing, customer service and support.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

The solved assignment has been prepared for “State the meaning of Product life cycle and explain the different stages involved in it”. It is the solved assignment of MB0046 (Marketing Management) for SMU MBA. You should take a view of Micro Environmental Forces of Marketing and International Market Entry Strategies too.

The product which is introduced into the market will undergo some modifications over the period. Its sales also fluctuate. Therefore marketer is interested in finding out how sales changes over period? And what strategies best suits at that point? A product life cycle can be graphed by plotting aggregate sales volume for a product category over time.

Generally the curve resembles bell shaped curve but it is not the only one type of curve. We can obtain style, fashion or fad style of product life cycles also.

According to the type of cycle of product passes through five stages:

1. Product development stage: In this stage company indentifies the viable idea and develops it. Sales in this stage are zero but require huge research and development budget.

2. Introduction stage: Company introduces the product into the market. As the product is new to the market, awareness is usually very low.

3. Growth stage: Company gets experience over the period and now tries to get the maximum market share. Sales will grow rapidly resulting in lesser cost and better profit.

4. Maturity stage:

  • a. Peak sales
  • b. Low cost per customer
  • c. High profits
  • d. Competition based pricing
  • e. Communicating the product differentiation to consumer
  • f. Improving supply chain efficiency
  • g. Defend the market share
  • h. Industry experiences the consolidation

5. Decline stage: In this stage, product and profit declines. Company should phase out weak items from their product mix.

Some Other Product Life Cycles:

1. Style: a style is a basic and distinctive mode of expression appears in the field of human behavior.

2. Fashion: currently accepted or popular style in a given field for example, cargo jeans are now fashion with college going students.

3. Fad: a fashion that enters quickly, adopted with great zeal, peaks early and decline very fast for example, when the pager is introduced, everybody would like to have the product. But when people found mobile as alternative the demand for the product went down drastically.

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