Understanding Marketing and Customer Relationships

Understanding Marketing and Customer Relationships

MKT/421

Understanding Marketing and Customer Relationships

Marketing is a multi-step process that helps in building successful customer relationships. This is essential to any organization as it helps with growth and reaching their goals as a company. Within this assignment, I will define marketing, the customer care proposition, and go over how creating relationships between the organization and customers is beneficial to both parties. I will also explain how the application of these concepts can benefit our Credit Union.

Marketing

The American Marketing Association is essential to the community of marketers, as this organization provides more ways for marketers, as well as, academics to connect with the proper resources in order to be successful. According to “American Marketing Association” (2016), “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” With this definition, we are able to see that marketing is significantly more than just simple advertising or promoting. We can see how “it stresses the need to deliver genuine value in the offerings of goods, services, and ideas being marketed to customers” (Kerin & Hartley, 2017, Chapter 1). It is also important for us to note how important it is that an organization’s marketing activities should create value for the partners and also the society.

Customer Value Proposition

The customer value proposition “is a cluster of benefits that an organization promises customers to satisfy their needs” (Kerin & Hartley, 2017, Chapter 1). This is seen as being one of the most important tools used by marketers. The value proposition is a promise by a company to a customer and it is an easy to understand reason as to why this customer should purchase a product from the business. According to “Investopedia” (2018), “A value proposition should be a clear statement that explains how a product solves a pain point, communicates the specifics of its added benefit and states the reason why it’s better than similar products on the market.” A well thought value proposition is short and too the point, while tempting the customer’s strongest decision making drivers.

Advertising and Marketing

There are many people who believe that advertising and marketing are the same thing, but this is simply not the case. Advertising and marketing have the same objective of informing customers of products and services being sold, so this is one way of how they are similar. According to “Marketing vs. Advertising: What’s the Difference?” (2018), “Advertising is the literal process of making a product and service known to an audience.” This is how the product, idea, or service is presented to the audience. Advertising uses campaigns to get the word out about the product or service while ensuring it aligns with the potential audience. Advertising is a component of marketing. While marketing refers to preparing a product for the marketplace, advertising is what is used to get that product known to the marketplace. Marketing is more controlled, while advertising is specific to brand communication. Marketing is seen as being the research and practice side of things, while advertising is just the practice side.

Relationship between Company and Customer

It is difficult for a business to be everything to every customer that they have. We are not going to be able to make every customer happy, but what we can do as an organization is provide a unique value and long relationship with our customers. “Relationship marketing is what links the organization to its individual customers, employees, suppliers, and other partners for their mutual long-term benefit” (Kerin & Hartley, 2017, Chapter 1). Relationship marketing involves a personal and ongoing relationship between the business and the customers individually. For this to be done effectively, the marketing managers have to learn what prospective customers need and convert these ideas to marketable products.

My Company

The company I work for currently is OneAZ Credit Union. We use the customer value proposition by looking at current rates on loans and checking and savings benefits that other credit unions offer. By doing this, we strive to have the best products available to our members with the lowest rates available. We review our fee schedule twice a year to ensure that we are still providing the lowest fee schedule compared to other financial institutions. We also review our loan rates quarterly and make adjustments to be competitive with the market. We advertise these rates by with mailers, in branch signage, social media, and a few commercials. These outlets are also used when it comes to how we use relationship marketing. We, of course, are unable to please every member that we have, but we strive at listening to member feedback.

My Brand

My personal brand is similar to the customer values that the credit union has. I understand how important it is to have relationship marketing and how important the customer value proposition is to any business. One thing that I think the credit union could do to help build stronger relationships would be to do more advertising outside of the credit union. Currently, most of our advertising about accounts or products is to our existing members. I think that if we did more advertising online and through commercials, we would be able to grow our memberships and bring in more people to build relationships with.

Conclusion

From the information provided today, we can see just how important marketing is to any business, whether it be new or existing. We have learned that marketing is not just advertising, as it also creates value in the offerings of goods and services. We learned that the customer value proposition is one of the most important aspects to marketers. We discussed how advertising is apart of marketing, but is not as in depth as marketing is, as advertising is more of just the practice, while marketing is research and practice. I also showed you how OneAZ Credit Union uses relationship marketing and customer value proposition to benefit the members. Lastly, I discussed how I feel that my brand will benefit the credit union by developing additional ways to market outside of the credit union to build more relationships with customers.

References:

American Marketing Association (2016). Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx 

Kerin, R. A., & Hartley, S. W. (2017). Marketing (13th ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection database.

Investopedia (2018). Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valueproposition.asp 

Marketing vs. Advertising: What’s the difference? (2018). Retrieved from https://online.csp.edu/program-resources/marketing-vs-advertising 

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