Discussion Questions and Activities

13.7 Discussion Questions and Activities

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. 
   As a customer, would it be important for you to know how your salesperson was paid? Why or why not?
   
2. 
   Should salespeople be responsible for handling all their customers’ complaints or should customers be told to call the departments responsible for the complaints? Explain your answer.
   
3. 
   What impact would a service-dominant logic approach have on how you craft sales strategy?
   
4. 
   Assume you sell plumbing supplies via a distributor that sells to retailers.
   
   1. 
      What can you do to shorten the distributor’s sales cycle? To improve its conversions?
      
   2. 
      Assume you are the distributor and you have five salespeople working for you. Two call on plumbing companies and large construction companies at job sites, whereas the other three work as salespeople in your warehouse. What can you do to shorten the sales cycle of each group? How might your efforts affect the performance each group differently?
      
5. 
   Assume you invented a new plastic-shaping technology that allows plastic products to be manufactured much more cheaply. When you talk to manufacturers, though, they are skeptical because the new method is so radically different from any technology they have ever used before.
   
   1. 
      What do you think the sales cycle for the technology would look like? What would the most important step of the sales cycle be? Why?
      
   2. 
      What type of sales force would you utilize and why?
      
   3. 
      What marketing activities could help you shorten the sales cycle and how?
      
6. 
   In many organizations, marketing and sales do not get along very well. Describe what you would expect to be the results in an organization such as this.
   
7. 
   Based on this chapter, what are three questions you would want to ask in a job interview if you were interviewing for an entry-level marketing position?
   
8. 
   Salespeople are often viewed with disdain by the general public. What has this chapter taught that could change those perceptions?
   

ACTIVITIES

1. 
   Contact a salesperson and ask if you can spend a half-day observing sales calls. Whether you are able to observe or not, ask these questions: What are the segments within that salesperson’s territory? How do they make decisions and what are the key sales activities?
   
2. 
   Contact a professional who works with salespeople. This exercise can be done with physicians who have reps call on them, professors who have sales reps call on them, as well as professional purchasing agents. What do they think of salespeople and the value that these professionals get from their salespeople? What separates the good salespeople from the ones that are not so good?
   

Chapter 14

Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Empowerment

The marketing concept, described in Chapter 1 "What Is Marketing?", reminds us that the customer should be at the center of a firm’s activities and that the company that thrives is the one that serves customers’ needs better than the competition. Yet often it is the customer who is most adept at serving the customer’s needs. Consumers being able to take control of the marketing activities aimed at them is what customer empowerment is about. Today, technology is making it more possible for the customer to do exactly that. In a recent survey, the chief marketing officers of 250 top companies were asked about the key factors that influence the performance of their companies. The officers’ response? A company’s ability to interact and respond to its customers as well as empower them. ^[1]

Research shows that customer empowerment is a function of three things: creating feedback channels that are easy and widely available, asking for and encouraging feedback about products, and enabling customers to participate in the design of products. In Chapter 5 "Market Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning", we discussed how customers can participate in the design of products, or offerings. In this chapter, we focus on those ubiquitous feedback channels, as well as strategies to solicit and encourage feedback.
Take JCPenney, for example. You might think that a company as large as JCPenney would be unable to give customers the ability to create their own types of shopping experiences—that standardizing the products and services they receive would be necessary. But JCPenney is an excellent example of how a firm can use the Internet and other technology to engage its customers and provide them with more control over the products and marketing communications they receive.

Audio Clip

Interview with Laura Carros
http://app.wistia.com/embed/medias/376e05324b

Listen to an interview with Laura Carros, a JCPenney executive responsible for many of the company’s customer initiatives.

[1] Girish Ramani and V. Kumar, “Interaction Orientation and Firm Performance,” Journal of Marketing 72, no. 1 (2008): 27–41.

14.1 Customer Communities

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. 
   Understand strategies involving online and personal forms of influencer marketing.
   
2. 
   Relate influencer marketing to other forms of social communities and marketing strategies.
   

If you are about to buy a new high-definition television, where do you go to learn about which one is best? Like many buyers, you probably turn to the Internet and visit sites such as Epinions.com or ConsumerSearch.com. Do you want to learn about the products of a specific retailer? More than 4,700 JCPenney products have been reviewed on Epinions.

The point is that consumers talk. They talk to each other, and they post their thoughts and opinions online. Word of mouth, or the passing of information and opinions verbally, has a powerful influence on purchasing decisions. You rely on word of mouth when you register for classes. For example, you ask other students about which professors are best and how hard their classes are. If you have no one to ask, you can look at online sites such as ratemyprofessors.com.

Buzz refers to the amount of word of mouth going on in a market. However, in addition to traditional word of mouth, buzz includes blogs, articles, and other information about an offering.
Companies try to create buzz about their products by sending press releases, holding events, offering free samples, writing blogs, or releasing podcasts. Some marketing managers actually spend time “trolling” the Web looking for postings about their products. If a negative posting appears to be a legitimate complaint, then the marketing manager can take action to fix the customer’s problem, and future complaints of the same nature can be avoided.

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