Dennis Herhausen examines how managers can successfully probe latent needs and uncover future needs of customers, labeled as proactive customer orientation. Overall, a systematic change process is developed to guide managers that aim to increase their company's proactive customer orientation.
Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science. This volume includes the full proceedings from the 2007 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference held in Coral Cables, Florida.
James Heskett, Earl Sasser, and Leonard Schlesinger reveal powerful new evidence that paying close attention to the employee-customer relationship will enable any organization to be a low-cost provider and achieve superior results -- proving that you can have it all, a goal thought inadvisable just a few short years ago. At the heart of this bold assertion is the authors' indisputable conclusion supported by thirty-one years of groundbreaking research: today's employee satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment strongly influences tomorrow's customer satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment and ultimately the organization's profit and growth -- a quantifiable set of associations the authors call the value profit chain. In what may be the most far-reaching study ever undertaken of the strategic importance of the employee-customer relationship, Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger offer profound new insights into the life-long value of both employees and customers and the increasingly important concept of employee-relationship management. Readers will discover how organizations as diverse as aluminum maker Alcoa, travel agency Rosenbluth International, and the Willow Creek Community Church treat employees like customers (in the case of Willow Creek, volunteers as well). Conversely, the authors show how advertising agency Merkley Newman Harty and financial services provider ING Direct treat customers like employees, pursuing the ones they want most. At the Vanguard Group, Cisco Systems, and Southwest Airlines, both practices are common. The authors explain how these organizations and many others -- whether large or small, public or private, or not-for-profit -- achieve profitability and growth or the equivalent by leveraging results and process quality to deliver differentiated products and services at the lowest cost. Timely, essential, and important reading, The Value Profit Chain should be readily accessible on the desk of every forward-thinking manager.
This Eighth Edition reflects the new developments within personality psychology, and gives the student a picture of the field as a cumulative, integrative science that builds on its rich past and now allows a much more coherent view of the whole functioning individual in the social world. This revision, subtitled: Toward an Integrative Science of the Person, is committed to making that integration, and its practical applications and personal relevance to everyday life, even more clear and compelling for our students. In this new edition the focus is placed on distilling how findings at each of the six major levels of analysis of personality (trait-disposition, biological, psychodynamic-motivational, behavioral-conditioning, phenomenological-humanistic, and social-cognitive) still speak to and inform each other, and how they add to the current state of the science and its continuing growth.
The Second Edition provides an overview of current research, theory and practice in this expanding field. The editorial team and the authors come from diverse professional and geographical backgrounds, and provide an unprecedented coverage of topics relating to both culture and climate of modern organizations.
What is customer orientation? And how does it fit in your idea of a good marketing strategy? This book can help you understand more about the relationships, applications, and steps to take to drive continuous relationships with customers to aid in the process of defining and implementing niche strategies, international marketing efforts, and electronic commerce. Inside, the authors start with classic marketing concepts and then review important developments and research of the latest findings (both from the theoretical and applied points of view) to present specific examples, methodologies, policy measures, and strategies that can be implemented to increase and perfect customer satisfaction. Both manufacturing and service businesses are addressed, and the results will give you a combination of the major studies in this specific field of marketing and strategy to offer a comprehensive strategic tool for decision makers in organizations.
Learn the secrets of doing business successfully in China! From tips on how to run joint ventures with Chinese companies to research on the tastes of Chinese consumers, Greater China in the Global Market contains the most up-to-date information on business and marketing strategies in China. This volume brings you the practical advice and empirical research of top experts in the field, including John Farley of Dartmouth College, John Child of Cambridge University, and Rohit Despande of Harvard University. Tapping China's huge economy can be highly profitable, but only if you understand the subtleties of doing business in the Chinese culture. Greater China in the Global Market offers insider's views of guanxi, the Chinese concept of relationship that can make or break international business ventures in China, as well as the expertise in Chinese corporate and consumer cultures you will need to establish successful business strategies. Greater China in the Global Market presents a comprehensive view of the essential factors in marketing to China, including: the difference in corporate culture between joint ventures and state-owned enterprises the most effective ways to manage the value chain activities in joint ventures the merits and limitations of various entry strategies, including umbrella companies, franchising, and contractual joint ventures, among others the influence of risk-absorption capability and risk-dispersion mechanisms on the choice of entry mode the factors that influence timing your entry into the market the changing tastes of Chinese consumers the correlation between brand consciousness and income in younger consumers a thorough literature review of twenty years of marketing research on China Greater China in the Global Market is a valuable resource for front-line marketing executives in China as well as corporate decision makers in their headquarters at home. It is a must read for academics and business practitioners with an interest in China.
'The Routledge Companion to Strategic Human Resource Management' is a prestige reference work offering a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. It surveys the state of the discipline and introduces and makes sense of new cutting edge themes.
Now in its fourth edition, it presents a new and refreshing approach to the study of tourism, considering issues such as overtourism, advances in AI and its impacts, waste management and environmental crisis, the sharing economy and Airbnb, the tourist experience and product development.
Customer-orientation, customer-centricity, and customer relationship management (CRM) are not new concepts or practices. But information technology has unleashed tremendous opportunities in dealing with a customer and in creating value to the customer. And yet the majority of CRM investments and initiatives fail because firms do not have the appropriate orientation to serving the customer. The principal aim of this book is to get the reader to think about th firm and the way it conducts its business in a certain way—with a customer focus. It is now becoming clearly evident that all firms compete on service. Providing superior service becomes a prerequisite for any differentiation strategy to succeed. To provide superior service for a competitive advantage requires a concrete understanding of what service-orientation means. This orientation, in the form of frame of mind, is essential for the firm to take advantage of opportunities and to address the challenges so as to gain a competitive advantage. For excellent service firms, the challenges and opportunities in providing services are a constant endeavor. For others, these challenges and opportunities are not that obvious. A complementary aim of this book, therefore, is to instill into the reader the principles of managing services.