Building customer value

Building Customer Value, satisfaction, and Loyalty
Successful marketing companies invert the chart. At the top are customers: next in importance are frontline people who meet, serve, and satisfy customers: under them are middle managers, whose job is to support the frontline people so they can serve customers well; and at the base is top management, whose job is to hire and support good middlemanagers.
Some companies have been founded whit the customer-on-top business model, and customer advocacy has been their strategy – and competitive advantage – all along. Whit the rise of digital technologies such as the internet, today´s increasingly informed consumers expect companies to do more than connect whit them, more than satisfy them, and even more than delight them.
CUSTOMER PERCEIVEDVALUE (CPV) = Is the difference between the prospective customer´s evaluation of all the benefits and all the cost of an offering and the perceived alternatives.
TOTAL CUSTOMER BENEFIT = is the perceived monetary value of the bundle of economic, functional, and psychological benefits customers expect from a given market offering because of the products, services, personnel, and image involved.TOTALCUSTOMER COST = is the perceived bundle of costs customers expect to incur in evaluating, obtaining, using, and disposing of the given market offering, including monetary, time, energy, and psychological costs.
The marketer can increase the value of the customer offering by some combination of raising economic, functional, or emotional benefits and/or reducing one or more of the various types ofcosts.
APPLYING VALUE CONCEPTS = the steps in this analysis are:
1. Identify the major attributes and benefits that customer’s value = Customers are asked what attributes, benefits, and performance levels they look for in choosing a product and vendors.
2. Assess the quantitative importance of the different attributes and benefits = Customers are asked to rate the importance of the differentattributes and benefits. If their ratings diverge too much, the marketer should cluster them into different segments.
3. Assess the company´s and competitors´ performances on the different customer values against their rated importance = Customers describe where they see the company´s and competitors´ performances on each attribute and benefit.
4. Examine how customers in a specific segmentrate the company’s performance against a specific major competitor on an individual attribute or benefit basis = If the company´s offer exceeds the competitor´s offer on all important attributes and benefits, the company can charge a higher price, or it can charge the same price and gain more market share.
5. Monitor customer values over time = The company must periodically redo its studies ofcustomer values and competitors´ standings as the economy, technology, and features change.
CHOICES AND IMPLICATIONS = Some marketers might argue that the process we have described is too rational. Suppose the customer chooses the Komatsu tractor. How can we explain this choice? Here are three possibilities.
1. The buyer might be under orders to buy at the lowest price
2. The buyer willretire before the company realizes that the Komatsu tractor is more expensive to operate
3. The buyer enjoys a long-term friendship whit the Komatsu salesperson
DELIVERING HIGH CUSTOMER VALUE = Consumers have varying degrees of loyalty to specific brands, stores, and companies. Loyalty as “A deeply held commitment to rebuy or repatronize a preferred product or service in the future despitesituational influences and marketing efforts having the potential to cause switching behavior.
The value proposition consists of the whole cluster of benefits the company promises to deliver; it´s more than the core positioning of the offering.
The value delivery system includes all the experiences the customer will have on the way to obtaining and using the offering.

TOTAL CUSTOMER SATISFACTION...