Customer-oriented Leadership: From being a Service Provider to Strategic Partner
February 12, 2025
The previous article in this series looked at how the media is an important pillar of democracy and how unless there is a free and fair media, democracies cannot be well functioning ones. This article looks at the other side and that is the practice of ethics by the media itself. In a way, this […]
As depicted by name Desk Research is the research technique which is mainly acquired by sitting at a desk. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive’s time, telephone charges […]
Stated simply, Services Marketing refers to the marketing of services as against tangible products. As already discussed, services are inherently intangible, are consumed simultaneously at the time of their production, cannot be stored, saved or resold once they have been used and service offerings are unique and cannot be exactly repeated even by the same […]
Consultative selling has been one of the most recent selling concepts that have evolved in the marketing field today. As Organizations have become customer oriented and service oriented, they have begun to realize that trying to sell their products or services to the Customers is not enough anymore. The salesmen are no longer just agents […]
Customer response is the reaction by the organization to the queries and activities of the customer. Dealing with these queries intelligently is very important as small misunderstandings could convey unalike perceptions. Success totally depends on understanding and interpreting these queries and then working out to provide the best solution. During this situation if the supplier […]
Success of Business Managers and Marketing Managers depends largely upon short term goal of achieving targeted sales as well as focusing continually on long term strategies to grow and retain the leadership in the market. Becoming a brand leader and continuing to retain the leadership calls for the Organization to continually be in touch with the markets, external environment, to readjust its product delivery and value proposition to meet with the Customer expectations consistently.
The process of re-engineering business processes of the organization to augment the efficiencies begins first with scanning the market, understanding the dynamics, analyzing the trends and working internally to choose the best solution that is sustainable and helps to innovate with the chosen value proposition. For example, costs of production are always rising but dropping prices has become the acceptable practice in the market for most of the products. Economic and Lower pricing is often a chosen mode for the Organizations to increase their market share and grow the market.
The decision to lower the prices is alright as long as it is clearly understood that the lowering of prices does not affect the product or the quality and serviceability to the customer. Internally too, the price reduction should not affect the bottom line and this costly mistake should never be made by the Business Managers. Those who work methodically to realign the value proposition and the product offering with lower pricing will find ways and means to lower its cost by re-engineering production and other business processes including procurement, vendor management as well as logistics.
Thus, when the cost reduction is driven by increasing effectiveness and efficiency of organizational and business processes, and the bottom line is maintained intact, the organisation succeeds in the right way.
Most often you find multinational companies closing their plants in developed countries and shifting their manufacturing bases to developing Asian countries or outsourcing their manufacturing in order to cut down on their overall product cost and be able to offer higher volumes at lower prices while retaining their profit margins intact.
Companies like American Power Conversion, Eaton etc have continually invested in setting up facilities in new countries and managed to kill competition by offering superior product at highly competitive prices.
Take the example of computer and laptop industry. When the competition began to increase, most of the market leaders quickly moved in to establish manufacturing hubs around China, India, Singapore and Thailand etc to be able to increase their focus on the Eastern markets and this helped them bring down the prices of their product and retain healthy margins.
If you study the way Dell has managed to redefine the value of their product offering to the customers, you can see that they have focused on ensuring higher value proposition to their customers.
Dell customers know that the laptops they buy at competitive prices are built with high end system architecture that makes the laptops more secure and sturdier than the rest of the laptops in the market.
Once a Dell customer continues to be a loyal customer lifelong because Dell offers increased value to the customers continually with better product innovation and configurations while continuing to compete in the highly price sensitive market.
Focus on enhancing product technology as well as re-engineering its supply chain and leveraging on technology to bring down its operational costs is helping Dell maintain its leading position.
At the same time, the major competitor IBM has hived off its Laptop and Desktop business to Lenovo with the clear understanding that its focus lies in delivering high end servers and other business solutions. IBM has chosen different set of value proposition that it would like to operate with and has accordingly re-aligned its business model.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *