Competitive Intelligence and Sales Management - Research Paper Example

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH College Competitive Intelligence and Research Introduction In the contemporary business environment customer relationship has become an important aspect of business. Competition in both domestic and international markets has become a big threat to entrepreneurs pushing them to evaluate new strategies to create a positive customer relationship between the target buyers and the organizations. The customer lies to the heart of the business as the number of customers is proportional to the volume of sales within an organization (Agnihotri, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, & Singh, 2012). In the era of business internationalization, internet and computer technology have become new business tools for managers to achieve business efficiency. The proliferation of the social media has created a potential for investors to roll out their products to the customers worldwide with higher efficiency. However, this approach has its own limitations as organizations raise question as to whether social media is an adequate platform for organizations to build strong customer relationship. For a long period now, the literature concerning the relationship between customer relationship and an efficient online presence has increased, yet it has not yet answered the question of whether organizations should focus on this business option. The purpose of this research is to investigate whether social networking based marketing helps a business to build a positive customer relationship with its customers. This research will employ a deductive approach to identify the merits of using social media for marketing in the modern business environment (Mehrdad & Seyedeh, 2013). A qualitative approach will be used to identify the various benefits and challenges of marketing on social media and to draw the relationship between customer relationship and the online strategy. The main focus of the research will be to evaluate how the social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype affects aspects of customer loyalty within any particular market. The research intends to close the literature gap that exists concerning social media advertisement and to end the controversy that has limited organization indulgence in social media advertisement. The findings of this research will help organizations from across the world to understand the value and the limitations of focussing on social media marketing, and to identify strategies that they can use to optimize customer relationship building. Research Objectives To investigate if social media marketing helps a business organization to develop positive relationship with its customers Research Question This research intends to answer the question whether social media market can help a business to develop positive relationship with their customers. Research Hypothesis Social media marketing helps a business to develop a positive relationship with their customers Literature Review In the recent past, business researchers have engaged in research to investigate the impact of social media advertisement and the business performance. In the 21st century, there has been an upsurge of business competition, forcing most businesses to venture into international markets as part of their strategy to expand their geographical coverage. As domestic market becomes saturated, organizations have to resort to international business strategies to overcome the threat of business competition (Clark, 2012). However, entry into the international market has been a great challenge for many organizations due to the complexities of this market. Cultural diversity and variation in customer tastes has become a threat to customer loyalty. The customer lies at the heart of the organizational performance and hence organizations have set it as a business priority to develop a positive customer relationship. Loyal customers are of great value to the organization as they ensure that the business continues to thrive even during tough market conditions. The concession that exists is that organization must develop strategies on how to win customer loyalty in their market positioning strategy. As a result, international organizations has put it a top priority to win customer loyalty both in the short and long-term. The issue of customer relationship is common in the business environment. The traditional marketing strategies have focussed on the use of product launch campaigns, television advertisement and other strategies to reach out for customers. A wide range of research has tried to investigate the nature of effective customer relationship model. Rosman and Stuhura (2013) identified that a good customer relationship model as one that allows a two way communication process between the customers and the business. The implication of this is that the marketing platform should communicate information on the organizational products to the customers effectively, and leave a channel for the customers to provide feedback (Clark, 2012). It is this customer’s feedback that allows the marketers to model their products to suit the customer tastes and preferences. In this research, most customers responded that the best organizations are ones that listen to the customers ideas and implements them in the product design. The role of the management is to ensure that they create adequate communication channels for the customers to contribute their views to the organization. The conclusion of this research is that to build customer relationship, the marketing platform must provide a platform for customer-marketer communication. Rosman and Stuhura (2013) set out on a research to analyse new perspectives of online social media that have changed marketing strategies. They analysed the failures of the traditional advertisement methods that failed to provide a two way communication process. For instance, the print and television advertisement provided unidirectional information to which the customers could not react upon. This was a period when organizations ignored the role of customer input in constructing as strong customer relationship model. However, this research agrees with previous research by Terrell and Kwok (2011) that argues that the online social media has resulted to new perspectives of marketing where customers and the marketer can come into a common ground. Social media has given the customers the power to have more control on how information is generated, utilized and shared within the online presence. This seems to refer to social media sites such as Facebook that today have become major marketing platforms. With billions of user, Facebook allows the people to meet and communicate effectively. The increase in the online presence as a result of technological development underpins the reason why most business enterprises are focussing on this direction to meet more potential customers. Therefore, many researchers have reached a concession that social media is a strong marketing site that can allow businesses to meet with their customers more frequently. Numerous researchers have set out to investigate the merits of social media in advertising today. Clark (2012) identifies that the advantage of social media is the fact that it is international and not subject to geographical limitations. However, he is keen to identify that diversity in social media makes it quite hard for organizations to understand customer relations and a time may result in collapse of customer relationship. Another advantage is that social media provides a platform for a conversational approach to marketing. For instance, on Facebook, the organization can post advertisement on its page, while customers can provide feedback through the like and comment button (Rosman & Stuhura, 2013). By reflecting and responding to customer comments, it is possible for the organization to satisfy the customers’ preferences and respond to their questions. This is a crucial aspect of customer relationship that keeps the customers close to the organization. Also, the social media platform provides customer feedback, in form of praise or criticism, which is important for the business (Trainor, 2012). Customer feedback is crucial as it helps the organizational managers to understand the customer tastes and to provide strategies to address product issues. Organizations that use customer feedback to model their products are more to succeed in terms of sales and development. However, there is research that shows that social media advertisement could be ineffective in supporting customer relation management. The fact that the media attract a wide range of people makes it impossible to target the right group of potential customers (Andzulis, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2012). For instance, while marketing on Facebook, it is more likely that more youths will have access to this information and the older generations may not access such kind of information. This implies that social media marketing would be effective in meeting a specific target customer category and inefficient in reaching out for another. Secondly, negative criticism may result to negative customer relationship for a particular product. While product criticism is part of customer feedback, the fact that information spreads quickly within this network, it is clear that such information may have a negative impact on the products (Clark, 2012). For instance, if a member of the youth groups comments negatively over a product, it is likely that the other members of the group would have a negative attitude on the particular product. The controversial research findings that underpins social media marketing and the customer relationship management leaves a wide gap that makes it hard for entrepreneurs to focus on social media for advertisement. While there is a concession that social media marketing is a necessary strategy at the moment, there are those who feel that social media has its own bundle of disadvantages that can affect customer relationship (Stringham & Gerdes, 2010). The purpose of this research is to close this gap by approaching the problem from the customers end and identifying the customers’ attitude to social media advertisement and the way it impacts on their relationship to the organization (Trainor, 2012). Thus, this is a superior research that entrepreneurs can use to develop a strong online presence that can help them to build a positive customer relationship. Methodology For the purpose of this research, a qualitative approach will be used to collect and analyse data. The qualitative approach is superior in analysing subjective information from respondents. In this research, we intend to collect customer opinions which can be termed as qualitative data (Merriam & Merriam, 2009). The rational for selecting this approach is to ensure that the research offers the respondents the freedom to provide as much information as they wish, which can help to identify their attitude to customer relationship issues in social media. The sample population in this research is will be drawn from London, from which 50 respondents with internet awareness will be identified. The stratified sampling method will be used to identify the customers to ensure that there is uniform distribution of customers. The 50 respondents will be informed prior to survey to make them familiar with the research and to seek their cooperation. The respondent cooperation will ensure that there is accuracy and that the research provides reliable results. The data collection method for this research will be questionnaires. This method is selected instead of interview as it is simpler and provides information that is easier to analyse, unlike an interview that require voice recording. Open ended questions will be used for this research to give the respondents the freedom to provide their own opinions which is crucial for qualitative analysis. Unlike close ended questionnaires that limit deviation, open ended questionnaires are superior in collecting information that is subjective in nature (Merriam & Merriam, 2009). The questionnaires will be designed and validated through a pilot study. The pilot study will comprise of five students who will be required to respond to the questions. This will help to eliminate and correct the questions to meet the needs of the research (Mende, Bolton, & Bitner, 2013). Later, the questionnaires will be submitted to a research expert for close checking and fine tuning. The questionnaires will be submitted to the respondents through e-mail, and they will be given a period of one week to respond to the questions. This ample is provided to ensure that they have adequate time to provide as much information as possible. In the data analysis stage, a qualitative approach will be used. The information collected will be categorized according to the opinion of the respondents and related to the aspects of good customer relationship such as communication, customer feedback, response and information availability. The findings will be validated to maintain accuracy and to ensure that the response rate is above 80% (Merriam & Merriam, 2009). A response of over 80% will be considered as ideal and actionable. The results of the data analysis will help to come up with conclusion and recommendation on the impact of social media marketing on customer relationship management. The research is expected to last for a period of one month, after which the results and the conclusion will be submitted in full report. Limitations Although this research is unique and addresses vividly the concept of customer relationship, it suffers from a number of weaknesses that may impact its credibility. To begin with, the customer response is subject to the customer characteristics. This is because the research offers the freedom for them to provide unlimited information. While this is crucial, it impacts on the research in that some people may provide less than adequate information. Secondly, the qualitative nature of the research makes it impossible to measure the extent to which the social media marketing may impact customer relationship. Lastly, the geographical limitation of the research may be an issue that can affect this research as people from different regions may have different opinions (Merriam & Merriam, 2009). For future research, it would be crucial to focus on a wide geographical scope to obtain the response of more people from across UK. Conclusion In conclusion, if granted, this research will form a good ground for entrepreneurs to decide whether social media marketing is a good platform to establish a positive social relationship with customers. It ends the controversy that exists regarding the merits of social media marketing in the contemporary business environment. While research has conceded that organizations must adopt new technology for advertising, it has not shown the impact of such operations in the customer relationship aspect of business. Although the research is geographically limited, it collects adequate information that is actionable and can form a ground business decision making. The ability of the research to use a simplified deductive research approach and to minimise the cost, it makes it a worthwhile exercise that can help in injecting business efficiency. The fact that it approaches the problem from the customers end, it is a superior add to the literature that exists regarding social media marketing and customer relationship models. Bibliography Agnihotri, R, Kothandaraman, P, Kashyap, R, & Singh, R 2012, Bringing "Social" into Sales: The Impact of Salespeoples Social Media Use on Service Behaviors and Value Creation, Journal Of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 32, 3, pp. 333-348, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Andzulis, J, Panagopoulos, N, & Rapp, A 2012, A Review of Social Media and Implications for the Sales Process, Journal Of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 32, 3, pp. 305-316, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Clark, MN 2012, Social Customer Relationships: A Look at the Magazine Industry, Society For Marketing Advances Proceedings, pp. 143-144, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Mehrdad, H, & Seyedeh Faezeh Sadati Seyed, M 2013, Effect of Knowledge Management on Success of Customer Relationship Management in Eghtesad Novin Bank of Tehran, International Journal Of Business Management & Economic Research, 4, 6, pp. 839-848, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Mende, M, Bolton, R, & Bitner, M 2013, Decoding Customer-Firm Relationships: How Attachment Styles Help Explain Customers Preferences for Closeness, Repurchase Intentions, and Changes in Relationship Breadth, Journal Of Marketing Research (JMR), 50, 1, pp. 125-142, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Merriam, S. B., & Merriam, S. B., 2009. Qualitative research: A guide to design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Rosman, R, & Stuhura, K 2013, The Implications of Social Media on Customer Relationship Management and the Hospitality Industry, Journal Of Management Policy & Practice, 14, 3, pp. 18-26, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Stringham, B. & Gerdes Jr., J. 2010. An Analysis of Word-of-Mouse Ratings and Guest Comments of Online Hotel Distribution Sites. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 19(7), 773-796. doi: 10.1080/19368623.2010.508009 Terrell, K., & Kwok, L. 2011. Proceedings from 2011 Graduate Students Research Conference:Organizational Impression Management Behaviors in Social Media: A Perspective of a Social Networking Site. Amherst, MA: ScholarWorks. Trainor, KJ 2012, Relating Social Media Technologies to Performance: A Capabilities-Based Perspective, Journal Of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 32, 3, pp. 317-331, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2014. Read More