Market placement

Your organization might aim primarily to make a profit. But not always. For example, it might have sacrificed some short term income to gain a place in the market with better long term prospects.

Check that your organization has:

  1. Up to date research on its market
  2. A marketing plan that includes:
    1. the market in terms of post, present and potential customers
    2. customer expectations of price, quality and value
    3. performance measures
    4. a promotional strategy
      Note: a marketing plan is wider than an advertising strategy, as marketing also includes developing products to suit the particular expectations of market niches, including market placement and image management.
  3. Customer service standards and plans.
  4. An evaluation of the relevance of electronic commerce solutions (Business-to-business, business-to-consumer, government-to-business activities conducted via electronic communication methodologies and networks).

 

Customer feedback system

Feedback from your customer and staff will not only feed into your marketing but also into the Quality Assurance (QA) system, as it will generate information on the quality of your products and services.

Check that you have a suitable feedback system for customers and staff. If you don't, you will need to create one. It should be either in wiriting, or have a way of putting feedback in writing, and you need a way of making sure that it gets used. You can also include behavior, such as client observations, itemised statistics of purchases and of returns/refunds.

If you already have a feedback system, you must realistically appraise its effectiveness and any ways that it could be improved.

 

Assess the quality of your customers

Find out if the kind of customers you have are good customers or the kind of customers you don't want. If you have lots of low-quality customers, you might need to make changes, such as get better customers or change the way you provide service.

Good customers make high value purchases, are repeat customers, pay fair price, pay up straight away, and don't waste your time. In contrast, bad clients haggle for unrealistically low prices, pay late or not at all, and waste your time (fussy, uncessary refunds, etc.).

 

Questions

  1. What makes your organization distinctive?
  2. What demographic are your clients?
  3. Do you have reliable clients or are they very fickle?
  4. How does your product compare to the products of your competitors?
  5. Do your clients offer good long-term prospects? (For example, you might be locked into an older, more conservative age group and younger people view you or your product as old fashioned.)
  6. In some situations, you can compete against yourself, and you are your own favorite competitor. (In fact, it is illegal in some cases because it is so hard for others to compete against it.) When would it be best to compete against yourself? When is it wasteful or destructive?

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