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Relationship marketing summit: Buenos Aires, Argentina, ideas and research challenges for the next wave
Edited by Jaqueline Pels
Introduction
Marketing is about customer management. Marketing should relate the firm to its customers' everyday processes and practices so that value-in-use can be created in those processes. If this is done successfully, in return the firm should be able to capture value out of its customer relationships. Customer management is about making customers buy as well as making sure that they are satisfied with their purchases and that the likelihood is sufficiently high that they are kept and eventually grown into loyal customers. In other words, promises about what a product can do for customers in terms of value creation should be made successfully, and furthermore, the expectation created by these promises should be fulfilled. In the case of standardized consumer products conventional approaches to marketing, such as the marketing mix management approach with its given set of marketing variables, can persuade customers to buy and also make them satisfied with the value created in their practices by what they have bought. The product variable, well managed and geared towards customer processes, may be enough to keep promises made.
In a business-to-business environment as well as in service contexts this is not the case in such a straightforward manner. The market offering does not only include standardized products, but rather a host of various resources and processes that interacts with the customers' resources and processes. A product may be a major part of an extended offering, but today it is seldom enough to fulfill all customer expectations.
Ultimately, such an extended offering provides successful support to the customer's business process. A given everyday customer process (e.g. a production process) is supported by the core of the supplier's extended market offering (e.g. a production machine), whereas the customer's business process is supported by the entire extended offering. Because instead of consisting of more or less a core product only such an extended offering is a process geared towards supporting the customer's business process, it fulfils the characteristics of a service offering ([22] Grönroos, 2000). The physical goods elements of the offering are part of an on-going process of supporting the customer also including a host of other activities...