Билет №6

1. Describe and compare three management levels.

2. What is marketing? Explain the difference between the traditional marketing mix and the customer relationship marketing approach.

Marketing plays a key role in the company’s strategic planning process in several ways. First, marketing provides a guiding philosophy - the marketing concept - that suggests company strategy should revolve around building profitable customer relationships with important consumer groups. Second, marketing provides input to strategic planners by helping to identify attractive market opportunities and by assessing the firm’s potential of strategies for reaching the unit’s objectives. Once the unit’s objectives are set, marketing’s task is to carry them out to mutual advantage.

One component of a firm’s marketing strategy is the marketing mix which has been described as the set of controllable, tactical marketing tools that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the market place with its intended target market. The marketing mix consists of everything the firm can do to influence the demand for its product. The various possibilities can be collected into four groups of variables - product, place, price and promotion.

The 4 P’s take the seller’s view of the market, not the buyer’s view. From this buyer’s viewpoint, in this age of customer relationship marketing, the 4 P’s might better be described as the 4 C’s, according to Robert Lauterborn. The relationship can be described by the following chart:

The 4 P’s	The 4 C’s
Product Price Place Promotion	Customer solution Customer cost Convenience Communication

Thus while marketers see themselves as selling products, customers see themselves as buying value or solutions to their problems. And customers are interested in more than just price; they are interested in the total costs of obtaining, using, and disposing of a product. Customers want the product and service to be as conveniently available as possible. Finally, they want two-way communication. Modern marketers would do well to think through the 4 C’s first and then build the 4 P’s on that platform.

Customer relationship management is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction. Said another way, it is about developing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Modern marketers are going beyond designing strategies to attract new customers and create transactions with them. They are using customer relationship management to retain current customers and build long-term relationships with them. This new view is that marketing is the science and art of finding, growing and retaining profitable customers. The key to building lasting customer relationships is to create superior customer value and satisfaction. Customer perceived value is the difference between total customer value and total customer cost; whereas customer satisfaction is the extent to which a product’s perceived performance matches a buyer’s expectations.