Merlin Stone

After-Sales Service

Marketing success is affected by service in two ways: (1) By winning or losing hardware and software business (2) By being a source of revenue and profit in its own right Here, we highlight those areas where the interaction between marketing and after-sales service is greatest, starting with the demand for service.

Managing and Controlling Marketing

We start by recalling the two objectives of marketing, namely performance measured by market share, products launched, accounts maintained, prices achieved, brand loyalty, and so forth, and productivity, the relation between performance and the cost of achieving it. Productivity is often neglected by suppliers in times of high margins. As the market matures and competition intensifies, productivity becomes as substantial an issue throughout the market spectrum, ‘high end’ and ‘low end’, and may require similar solutions, such as computerisation of key elements of selling and account management and focused marketing. Many suppliers fall into the trap of assuming that when productivity becomes a serious problem, they will resolve it by using third-party distribution. This is rarely adequate as a solution, unless the supplier and distributor work together to increase productivity. In many cases, the total channel selling cost is the same, while control is lost by the supplier when utilising indirect channel strategies.

Customer Care, Support and Service

Until recently, most systems suppliers distinguished between the different non hardware elements of the relationship with customers — software, maintenance, customer support, pre sales service. Today, suppliers face a problem, in that some customers prefer to deal with suppliers on an integrated basis, while others prefer to separate clearly between different aspects of systems supply. The latter still want to buy all the different elements separately. For this reason, larger suppliers usually have to allow both these ways of working with customers to co-exist. For example, separate departments will exist for hardware and software sales, customer service and the like. But they will work together in special teams to deliver an integrated proposition to customers who require it.

How to market computers and information technology

The Scope of Computer Marketing - Strategic Overview - Strategic Alternative for Suppliers - Understanding the Market - Product Policy - Prices and Costs - Marketing Communications - Distribution Channel - Selling and Account Management - Customer Care, Support and Service - New Product Marketing Strategies - Database Marketing - Marketing Objective and Plans - Marketing Organisation - Managing and Controlling Marketing -

Selling and Account Management

This chapter is addressed to sales staff and their managers. It covers seven areas: (1) Identifying prospects and deciding the account mix (2) Researching the prospect (3) Defining the account plan (4) Developing a sales approach to meet the plan (5) Negotiating the sale (6) Teamwork in account development (7) Managing account development

New Product Marketing Strategies

This chapter covers the development of new product marketing policy, setting out the options available and suggesting criteria for choosing between them.

Marketing Objectives and Plans

In this chapter, we examine how objectives, strategies and the marketing mix are put together in a marketing plan. We define marketing planning as: A process which systematically and regularly reviews the direction of marketing policy in the context of a company’s business environment and its own capabilities, in order to make changes in policy which will lead to the company’s marketing objectives being more fully satisfied.

Strategic Alternatives for Suppliers

In this chapter we will consider the implications of the market development described in Chapter 2 and for the strategies of the principal players in the computing game. We start by reiterating the message of Chapter 2, and a major theme of this book, that is: Understand the prospect and the customer

Competing with Japanese Suppliers

In the next decade, Japanese companies will be increasingly influential in many sectors of the computer market. It is therefore important to understand the general behaviour of Japanese electronic companies, and the implications of their behaviour for Western computer suppliers. This chapter considers how product design, production, marketing, service, administration and general management are combined by some Japanese companies into a strategy which some Western companies find difficult to deal with.

Advertising, Promotion and Public Relations

Advertising, promotion and public relations (APPR) policy starts with a clear statement of marketing objectives and their implications for particular products, markets, segments and customers. Objectives likely to be more relevant to APPR relate to market share or volume — and their determinants, such as product and supplier awareness; and objectives relating to specific customer targets, product policy, price achievement and profitability — via the cost of advertising and its impact on volume and attainable price.