Marketing occurs within an organisation when consumers needs, wants and demands are met with the exchange of a product (Kotler & Armstrong, 1991). The concept is organisation wide, and particularly important when new products are introduced within a market. Customer value is an important aspect of marketing, as it aids in exploring what the consumers perceived needs and wants are. Customer value can be defined as the benefits gained, and sacrifices made in order to purchase a product. The main sources of value created by the organisation are functional/instrumental value, experiential/hedonic value, symbolic/expressive value and cost/sacrifice value. In this paper we will be looking towards the fore coming Apple Watch as an example. …show more content…
Apple have been carefully honing in on the customers needs and wants, and are finally ready to release the end product to expectedly enthusiastic consumers.
Customer value essentially is the perceived benefits concluded by the customer, derived from obtaining the product held up against the sacrifices being made to acquire the product (Weinstein, 2012). Organisations creating value, furthermore customer value is progressively being seen as a fresh and up to date source of competitive advantage (Woodruff, 1997). Because of this, the creation of customer value is an incredibly significant central concept within marketing (Patterson & Spreng, 1997). However there is not one single agreed upon definition that may be used for customer value, as well as no distinct definitive theory or framework used to emphasize customer value (Weinstein, 2012). Adopting the way in which organisations are able to create value, Smith and Colgate (2007), have developed an innovative framework where four types of value created merely by the organisation are acknowledged - these being functional/instrumental value, experiential/hedonic value, symbolic/expressive value and cost/sacrifice value.
Functional and instrumental value refers to the buyer purchasing the product and having it complete the function it is designed to do (Smith & Colgate, 2007). More so concerned with the
Apple manages to create hype about its products and makes grand presentation to launch them in the market. The launched product is immediately available in the retails and on-line stores for customers to review and purchase. Apple values its secrecy and guards it fiercely. This creates additional hype around the product as they have been known for delivering innovative and appealing products. The constant innovation at Apple ensured they had improved versions of previously launched products, which were then marketed to promote users to have a portfolio of a single product.
- The third form of customer value is expressive value (Smith and Colgate, 2007); the personal or larger social meaning that the product holds with the customer
Before i go further let me touch on a brief introduction on customer value, customer value can be defined as the difference between what a customer gets from a product and what he or
Source: Emma Woollacott (2014). Can China's Social Media Censorship Keep The Lid on Hong Kong Protests? [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2014/09/29/can-chinas-social-media-censorship-keep-the-lid-on-hong-kong-protests/. [Last Accessed 14 April].
Customers enable the organization to treat each customer in a different way on the basis of the contribution they make towards the firm (Kleinaltenkamp & Wengler, 2007). The analysis of customer lifetime value aids the organization to rank and order customers on the basis of their contribution to organization’s revenues. It also helps the organization to determine as to how much it can invest in retaining customers to gain positive returns on the investment.
This chapter discusses the value of a customer. It indicates that customers have different and distinctive actual values, potential values, which lead to their lifetime values. It is important that a company understand first, and foremost that the only reason that they are able to make a profit is because of their customer base. However, it is also important to realize the cost to serve a customer and to know how much value they bring to your business and if in fact they cost the company more to serve them then they spend.
This report aims to find out the relationship between customer value and marketing. In particular, it focuses on the necessity of marketing and the composition of customer value, research on the connection between these two concepts. In particular, it indicates four elements of a market, which are price, place, products, and promotion (4Ps). The other vital part of a market is customer value, it has been divided into instrumental value, hedonic value, expressive value and cost value. Customer value and marketing connect to each other through the supplier help people do better- buying decision and improve products through the customer value.
How, as a marketer, does one create customer value? To start, a marketer has to understand who they are selling to, the consumer. In order to understand the consumer, marketers strive to understand their behavioral patters, as in, where consumers shop, and more specifically, the behavioral pattern of how they buy.
Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) describe value propositions as the “bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment.” (22) This building block of a business model is essential in that it is the reason why consumers value one company over another. Value Propositions can also help organizations create customer loyalty and retention. With intense competition in markets, value propositions are an important part of a business model because it addresses competition and attempts to set the firm apart from the other choices presented to its customer base.
The strategy of a successful organization lies in attracting the right customers by differentiating themselves from competition. Customer value proposition (CVP) is the essence of that strategy (Noreen, Brewer, & Garrison, 2014) which helps the company to deliver value aligned with the organizations strategy to its targeted customers. Customers therefore infer that product as high value while purchasing and perceives that this value creates a reason for him or her to choose it over a competitor in the industry. Customer Value proposition states the reasons a customer may want to purchase a particular product or use a particular service, i.e. it emphasizes on the added value a particular brand has got that fulfills customer’s needs better. The “value” is the benefits that the company delivers to its customers through their product and service. Top level do not base their value proposition based on the promise to “deliver all the benefits” to its target customers the reason being that delivering too much benefits can dilute genuine points of difference (Anderson, A.Narus, &Rossum, 2006). Therefore successful companies have fewer elements (benefits) in their value proposition those of which that matter the most to their targeted customers.
What I have come to realize is that more often than not companies and people spend too much time talking and not enough time listening… listening to what customers truly need or want. Unfortunately, as a result, products and services provided have no real benefit or use to customers. As “everything culminates in the customer experience” it is imperative for businesses to produce or provide products or services their customers want (Rustogi, 2015). In addition, businesses need to be aware of the perceived benefits their products or services offer so they can drive those benefits through in all of their marketing, advertising, and promotional efforts.
Technology is an aspect of the 21st century that has redefined the way that consumers interact with the world. Looking at a recent advertisement of Apple’s Apple Watch Series 2, it is clear that there is no limit to how technology can be integrated into our life. Apple originally started as a technology company, which now develops products such as cellphones, computers, tablets, watches and much more. Over the recent years, Apple has many countless acquisitions, which enables them to continually grow their product categories. To highlight their ever growing product categories, Apple uses marketing allows for consumers to see a never ending the desire for a new product, making Apple extremely effective in their efforts. An example of the effective use of marketing of their new product lines (within a fairly new product category) is the advertisement for the Apple Watch Series 2.
This report aims to discuss the three parts of the marketing environment; The macro-environment, the micro-environment and the internal environment in relation to the Apple Watch which has yet to be released. The report will look at the possibility of success for the Apple watch in the UK market once it is released and how the levels of the marketing environment impact this success.
It means how company build strong relationships with customers and provides his customers to better products as compare to price which he pays against the product. Cadbury D.M.C provides all the above values and it also explains with the help of the following points.
Christian Grönroos and Annika Ravald (2010) analyzed the scope, content and nature of value co-creation in a service logic based view of value creation, considering the customer perspective in a supplier-customer relationship. They published their findings in the Journal of Service Management vol. 22 no. 1, 2011, pp 5–22. They emphasized to keep apart production and value creation, as according to them they are different constructs. Production is the course of making the resources consumers integrate in their consumption or usage procedures. Value creation is the process of generating value-in-use out of such resources. They say that hence the value is not produced; resources out of which value can be generated are produced. Due to the interactive nature of service activities, where manufacturing and consumption are partly concurring processes, customers involve themselves in the production process and become contributors in that process. The character of customers as co-producers of service activities was recognized already in the early days of service marketing research (Eiglier and Langeard, 1976; Grönroos, 1978, 1982). As Gummesson (1998, p. 247) declares, “a service provider without consumers cannot produce anything”.