Customer orientation

Stakeholder orientation refers to the plan to benefit every party that is impacted by the future failure or success of a given organization. Stakeholder orientation demonstrates the degree to which an entity attends to the interests of every stakeholder, and therefore it tries to address such interests. Ferrell, Gonzalez-Padron, Hult, & Maignan, (2010 p. 93), state that from a premeditated management viewpoint, a robust stakeholder orientation can result in competitive advantage in a company. Generally, any organization which truthfully observes stakeholder orientation shall be much more probable to act morally and it shall be more probable act in ways that are consistent with the concept of corporate social responsibility (Laczniak, & Murphy, P. E. 2012 p.286). Different forms of stakeholder orientation impact on business differently.

Customer orientation: Customer orientation for example places customer satisfaction at the central point of all organization’s business decisions. In this form of orientation, a company initiates ways through which it will focus on assisting clients to meet their long-term wants and needs. In this case, employees and management bring into line their individual and team goals around satisfying and retaining every customer. A successful customer orientation gives company insights into the anticipations of customers; a business aspect which has become crucial for every business (Ferrell, Gonzalez-Padron, Hult, & Maignan, 2010 p. 94).

Competitor orientation: Competitor orientation, on the other hand, implies that an organization comprehends both short-term weaknesses and strengths and long-term abilities and plans of both the key current and prospective competitors. A performance evaluation may include delivery times, employee retention, market share, customer satisfaction, pricing, production efficiency and innovation (Ferrell, Gonzalez-Padron, Hult, & Maignan, 2010 p.95). This form of orientation enables an organization to optimize advantages for itself at the expense of its key competitors in the market.

Employee orientation: Employee orientation refers to the process of familiarizing workers with their new occupations and work environments. This form of orientation gives a chance for new workers to become acquainted to their new department, colleagues, company, and job expectations. Effective orientations give way to several benefits for employees and employers, and can guarantee a smooth changeover into the new place of work for all involved.

Effectual relationship marketing calls for vigilant scheduling and implementation. Just like all plan implementation one needs to line up the correct processes, technologies, and people (Morgan, & Hunt, 1994 p.25).

1 – People Strategy: An organization should ensure that it has an understandable relationship marketing stratagem which supports and reflects its business plan, and the correct marketing team to deliver it. An extremely effectual strategy should attain efficiency, business intelligence and security. The relationship marketing strategy requires to be long term (Gummerus, von Koskull, & Kowalkowski, 2017 par.2). Relations are made and might end hastily when workforce leaves. A business needs to invest in the roles and resources that sustain relationship development, and get underway systems which capture insights when staffs do exit the organization. It is significant to pay for the correct level of resource: somebody who actually comprehends the organization’s long-term plans and sees the business’s big picture; somebody who acclimatizes as expected to the insights that current’s marketing expertise can create thanks to more accurate measurement and reporting.   

Competitor orientation

2 – Know Your Customer: A firm should really get to know, comprehend and value its clients. It should build up a picture. Organizations hold enormous amounts of customer data. Data from client feedback, regular CRM activity, marketing metrics, sales records, content management, responses to marketing campaigns, and even financial records. Putting all data in a single location builds up a persona for that firm and the individual as well. It mirrors the complete consumer life cycle as well as their worth to the organization (Gummesson, E. (2017 par.2). In addition, it offers vital opportunity and business intelligence to analyze the consumer data that shall provide the company with the insights to make decisions on the next best line of action to take (Brodie, 2017 par.2). In case this appears difficult, the firm can find technology partners who are eager and able to assist it achieve this.  Such durable insights shall tell the company how that customer intents to interrelate with the entity (Sheth, 2017 p.2). It might not hear from them for a moment or two, and in the short-term it still needs to ensure that the channel of communication is upheld such that when they are ready to return for more work, they come straight to the firm.

3 – Communicate: Exchange a few words frequently, in a customized manner, with the content the marketers know the firm consumers need to receive (since it has built their profile and paid attention to their comments). The company should communicate regularly and properly. Put up with that two-way exchange of ideas and promote opinion (Payne, & Frow, 2017 par.2). It is not easy to get in frontage of people one-on-one but this is where digital marketing approaches come in:

• Put into practice development programs around particular areas and topics of significance that individuals shall intent to sign up for without being asked
• Build up insights, thinking, and advice that are helpful and pertinent to the firm’s customers
• Modify all services and products to the clients since the responsible personnel listen to them and comprehend the needs and wants.
• Once in a while reward customers for their dependability. It can be a unique customer present, or enrichment to the client service offering or access to privileged content.   

Firm’s cloud-based association marketing technology is supposed to make it swift and simple for it to convey the digital content the customers yearn for, when they want it and on the piece of equipment they want.

From these core elements, I can argue that relationship marketing is a methodology planned to promote customer loyalty, interaction, and long-term engagement. It is premeditated to build up robust affiliations with consumers by offering them with information that directly suit their interests and needs and by fostering open communication.

A significant feature which separates the digital marketing environment from the conventional environment is the straightforwardness with which consumers can exchange word-of-mouth information, not just with a few close associates but as well with outsiders on an extensive social system. In a digital situation, consumers are able to share their reviews on brands, services, products, and organization at organizations’ websites and third-party social networks and websites and these evaluations reach a much bigger number of prospective consumers (Lamberton, & Stephen, 2016 p.147). A number of platforms and platform markets have gradually come up in the digital environment, including those which link firms with firms (business-to-business platforms) and firms with the crowd (innovation and crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter), those that connect customers with a multitude of firms/sellers (Amazon, media sites, Alibaba, and a variety of advertising exchange websites), and individual sellers with individual consumers (eBay) (Kannan, & Li, “Alice.” 2017 p.28).

Employee orientation

B2B (business-to-business), is also referred to as e-biz, refers to the sharing of services, products, or information (also known as e-commerce) between businesses, rather than between businesses and consumers. B2B websites can be categorized into various groups: Company product supply and procurement exchanges, websites, brokering sites, specialized or vertical and industry portals. The initiative of the sharing economy has started in the past few years, particularly when it comes to digital dealings. As more businesses are connecting with one another online to make sales, an entire new market of consumer sales is being formed.

Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing   are redefining innovation management through various ways such as breaking down a huge and multifaceted task into smaller and simpler tasks. This break down of big tasks enables adjustments in resources distribution to each of the new sub-tasks, as well as the ability to manage  the new simpler tasks more narrowly,  computing efficiency, and finally  paving  the  path  for  the  improvement  of  “scientific  management”  in  the  everyday organizational operations. Common Crowdfunding platforms include Kickstarter, Kiva, and Indiegogo.

Platforms such as Amazon, media sites, and Alibaba have also revolutionized digital commerce by connecting customers and a multitude of sellers or organizations. These platforms have helped reduce the distance separating these two parties. The likes of eBay, Alibaba, and Amazon have leaped in and filled a requirement, transferring the experience of customer shopping to the context of e-commerce. Getting rid of the complication and crafting variety for the consumer, as well as offering the chance to vend across new geological boundaries, means many B2B merchants are now able to find new consumers.

In the context of social marketing, a wicked problem refers to a problem which is hard or impracticable to resolve because of partial, opposing, and varying necessities that are frequently tricky to recognize. The usage of the terminology “wicked” in this context has come to signify resistance to resolution, rather than wickedness. Wicked problem is predicament whose social complexity implies that it has no foreseeable stopping tip. What is more, owing to the multifaceted interdependencies, the endeavor to resolve one characteristic of a wicked problem might disclose or create other problems (Parkinson, Russell-Bennett, & Previte, 2018 par.4).

System thinking as Brennan, Previte, & Fry, M.-L. (2016) point out, assumes a wider understanding.  It is seen as a technique of looking at the world as a hierarchy or a pecking order of systems that all link in particular manner.  Through this intersecting world-view technique, a dissimilar procedure for problem solving develops (Hamby, Pierce, & Brinberg, 2017 par.1).  Instead of isolating a wicked problem and then resolving it, which is an ordinary practice using conventional thinking, the ‘systems thinking’ method broadens the outlook to observe the area surrounding a problem. ‘Systems thinking’ as a developmental procedure aims to attain three objectives:

• comprehend a system’s dynamics—analysis;
• comprehend a system’s pecking order—synthesis; and
• Build up solutions—decision making.  

These concepts make it probable to employ ‘systems thinking’ as a function for resolving wicked problems.

References

Brennan, L., Previte, J., & Fry, (2016). Social marketing’s consumer myopia: Applying a behavioural ecological model to address wicked problems. Journal of Social Marketing, 6(3), 219–239. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSOCM-12-2015-0079

Brodie, R. J. (2017). Enhancing theory development in the domain of relationship marketing: how to avoid the danger of getting stuck in the middle. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(1), 20–23. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-05-2016-0179 

Ferrell, O. C., Gonzalez-Padron, T. L., Hult, G. T. M., & Maignan, I. (2010). From Market Orientation to Stakeholder Orientation. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 29(1), 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.29.1.93

Gummerus, J., von Koskull, C., & Kowalkowski, C. (2017). Guest editorial: relationship marketing – past, present and future. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-12-2016-0424

Gummesson, E. (2017). From relationship marketing to total relationship marketing and beyond. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(1), 16–19. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-11-2016-0398

 Hamby, A., Pierce, M., & Brinberg, D. (2017). Solving Complex Problems. Journal of Macromarketing, 37(4), 369–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0276146716663797

Kannan, P. K., & Li, H. “Alice.” (2017). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.11.006 

Laczniak, G. R., & Murphy, P. E. (2012). Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 31(2), 284–292. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.10.106

Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing: Research Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Inquiry. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 146–172. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0415

Morgan, R. M., & Hunt, S. D. (1994). The commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing. The journal of marketing, 20-38.

Parkinson, J., Russell-Bennett, R., & Previte, J. (2018). Challenging the planned behavior approach in social marketing: emotion and experience matter. European Journal of Marketing, 52(3/4), 837–865. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-05-2016-0309

Payne, A., & Frow, P. (2017). Relationship marketing: looking backwards towards the future. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(1), 11–15. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-11-2016-0380

Sheth, J. (2017). Revitalizing relationship marketing. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-11-2016-0397