customer relationship management ed peelen pdf

Services are stored in systems,buildings, machines, knowledge and people.

Instead, the centre of attention should be customization of offerings and a moreindividualized marketing, often in a combination expressed by the paradoxical concept ofcustomized mass marketing.

Marketing management and marketing mix theory particularly treat four phenomenaconnected to relationships, networks and interaction:1 The zero relationship (R0).

The main focus on transactions has influenced the definition of the zero relationship.

Price, being one of the 4Ps and the core variable in economics to explain the functioning of the market economy, is part of the zero relationship together with convenience.2 The relationship between the supplier and the customer (R1).

In the marketing mix theory, this is personal selling, a subcategory to the third P, promotion.

It deals with the face-to-face encounters between a salesperson and a customer with the purpose of persuading the customer to buy.3 The treatment of competition, which is comprehensive in both marketing management and specific competition literature and economics.

Here it is defined as the relationship between the buyer, the current supplier and the competitors (R2), and efforts to find marketing equilibrium.4 Physical distribution of goods is found under the fourth P, place, presented as networks of distribution channels far beyond the physical goods (R3).Within the marketing mix theory, image and brands are treated, but not with a relationshipangle.

I still do not considered it a classic area for marketing, especially as the views on brands with brand equity, brand identity, brand architechture and the far-reaching suggestion thatbrands are the core business rather than the product are children of the 1990s.

They havecontributed to the parasocial relationships (R13).Services marketing and service managementAt the beginning of the 1960s, the service sector share of GDP and employment got ahead ofthe industrial sector.

The reactions to this have been slow and it took until the second half ofthe 1970s for services marketing and management to gain attention.

Services marketing hadbeen treated by occasional writers during the 1960s, but obviously the time was not ripe(whatever that means).

During the 1980s, services marketing became the fastest growing fieldof marketing and, together with RM, CRM and IT, it will probably continue to be so.Contributions came from researchers in many countries, above all from the USA, UK, France 288 Total Relationship Marketingand the countries in Northern Europe, initially mainly from Sweden and Finland and todayreferred to as the Nordic School.7 In the early days of service research, much of the effort was devoted to show differencesbetween goods and services, and to prove that services need their own type of marketing.

Still,however, nobody has in a more fundamental and generic way been able to understand whatgoods and services are and how they relate to each other.

Usually, four properties arementioned in the literature in order to show the differences:1 Services are intangible, whereas goods are tangible.2 Services are less standardized than goods.3 Services cannot be stored.4 Finally, simultaneity and inseparability, meaning that the production and consumption of services are partly simultaneous and that customers partly participate in the production process.I mention these alleged differences as they are continuously repeated in the literature as therationale for separating goods marketing and services marketing.

The properties may seemattractive at first glance they have face validity but what are their operationalconsequences The first three can easily be dismissed.

But the aircraft, the food, the drinks and the staffare very tangible.

The airports and the view from the aircraft window and the feeling whenthere is turbulence are tangible, and if you are fortunate to fly by Concorde you feel thevibrations when the speedometer on the wall says 1 mach and the aircraft breaks through thesound barrier.

If I am operated on at the hospital I am myself the machine, the object of repairand maintenance.

Can it be moretangible Services and goods alike can be standardized and be produced in factories but yet includecustomized elements.

The pizzeria and the retail bank offer highly standardized services,while knowledge-intensive services from management consultants, lawyers and architects arehighly customized (although they contain standardized modules).7 For further discussion on the Nordic School, see Gro nroos and Gummesson (1985).

The international importance of the Nordic School has been covered in Berry and Parasuraman (1993); Fisk, Brown and Bitner (1993); and Fisk, Grove and John (2000).

For general overviews of services marketing with somewhat varying perspectives, see Lovelock, Patterson and Walker (1998); Lovelock, Vandermerwe and Lewis (1999); Gro nroos (2000); and Zeithaml and Bitner (2000).

The genesis of RM and CRM 289 The claim that services cannot be stored is nonsense.

Customer Relationship Management Ed Peelen Pdf