Marketing Strategy at Tesco plc Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Marketing Strategy at Tesco plc - Essay Example Superior service quality leads to favourable behavioural intentions, customer retention, a constant revenue stream, increased spending, willingness to pay price premiums, and word-of-mouth advertising and customer capture. Verbalising good intentions is merely the first step in creating a positive attitude of satisfaction, but the second more important one is delivering on the good intentions. Kotler (1977) emphasised that a market-orientated business must focus not only on selling but on customer satisfaction but failed to emphasise the disconnection between the two. Zemke and Schaaf (1990, 53) argue that the really useful, specific, directly applicable information comes from talking to customers, constantly and often at length, to determine what the company is doing that makes them happy or not. Cronin and Taylor (1994) focus on performance measures of service quality rather than customer expectations. Piercy's (2002) customer relationship sliding scale (Fig. ... , specific, directly applicable information comes from talking to customers, constantly and often at length, to determine what the company is doing that makes them happy or not. Cronin and Taylor (1994) focus on performance measures of service quality rather than customer expectations. Customer Focus Piercy's (2002) customer relationship sliding scale (Fig. 7.1, p.344) is more complicated than the matrix used by Reinartz and Kumar (2000) to determine which types of customers are worth keeping and for whom the company must spend marketing resources to achieve retention. Its justification came from research that "it can cost five times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one" (Weinstein et al., 1999, p. 119), following Reicheld (1994) who asserted that a 5 percent increase in loyalty can lead to a 25 to 85% increase in profitability. Pine (1993) talked of mass customisation and one-to-one marketing, echoing Hamel and Prahalad (1989) who warned of convergence of producers and customers with the Internet, which empower customers to become active co-creators of products, services, and value. Businesses have to show greater sensitivity to customer wants. Market Choices The simplified market choice diagram (Piercy, 2002, Fig. 8.1, p. 410) builds on the complex market analysis models proposed by academics such as the product-customer matrix (Piercy, 2002, Fig. 8.2, p. 412). These models build on studies made by management science academics as Freeman (1984) who proposed that the company must satisfy all of its stakeholders, quite an impossible task even for the best managers. Bartlett and Ghoshal (1994) argued for strategic choice, related to the purpose for the existence of the business. Hamel and Prahalad (1989, 75) suggested that businesses define