Satisfying Customer Needs
To succeed or simply to survive, companies need a new philosophy. To win in today's marketplace, companies must be customer-centred - they must deliver superior value to their target customers. They must become adept in building customer relationships, not just building products. They must be skilful in market engineering, not just product engineering. New chief executive of GEC Industries, George Simpson's views were honed at Rover where the corporate culture had to shift to the notion that customers need to like the ears they
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A company thatjocuses on customer developments in designing its marketing strategies and on delvoering superior value to its target customers.
buy. There was, he says, 'a bit of a tendency to have technology for technology sake'.2
Too many companies think that obtaining customers is the job of the marketing or sales department. But winning companies have come to realise that marketing cannot do this job alone. Although marketing plays a leading role, it is only a partner in attracting and keeping eustomers. The world's best marketing department cannot successfully sell poorly made products that fail to meet consumer needs. The marketing department can be effective only in companies in which all departments and employees have teamed up to form a competitively superior customer value-delivery system.
Consider McDonald's. People do not swarm to the world's 11,000 McDonald's restaurants only because they love the chain's hamburgers. Many other restaurants make better-last ing hamburgers. Consumers flock to the McDonald's system, not just to its food products. Throughout the world, McDonald's finely tuned system delivers a high standard of what the company calls Q.SCV - Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value. The system consists of many components, both internal and external. McDonald's is effective only to the extent that it successfully partners its employees, franchisees, suppliers and others in jointly delivering exceptionally high customer value,
This chapter discusses the philosophy of customer-value-creating marketing and tlie customer-focused firm. It addresses several important questions: What is customer value and customer satisfaction? Ilow do leading companies organize to create and deliver high value and satisfaction? How can companies keep current customers as well as get new ones? How can companies practise total quality marketing?
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