Direct & Digital Marketing - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... Gronroos (1994) has criticized the tenets of the Four Ps of marketing which according to him is a weak perspective altogether that has several negative implications on various critical aspects of marketing such as research and application, the limitations of traditional marketing approaches such as the Four Ps of marketing have also been recognized by Bitner (1991) who like Vargo & Lusch (2004) believes that conventional marketing concepts such as the Four Ps of marketing have contributed towards limiting the scope of marketing by asserting that decisions related to a product can be described in merely four dimensions. Owing to the limitations of traditional marketing concepts as identified by Gronroos (1994), Hutton (1996) presents a need to include public relations and politics in as relatively newer dimensions of the Four Ps. Several researches and literature conducted since the 1990s and even earlier, indicate that marketers must incorporate modern perspectives with traditional views to cater to the consumer of today. This view is greatly highlights the benefits of moving towards contemporary approaches and logics to marketing, the most important of which is the concept of relationship marketing (Gronroos, 1994; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). According to Berry (1995), relationship marketing aims to focus more on the approach of retaining existing customers rather than utilizing a majority of the organization’s resources in the pursuit of attracting new customers. The importance of customer retention is so vital to the progress of an organization that a study conducted by Reichbheld & Sasser (1990) concluded that even if an organization is able to increase its customer retention rates by 5 percent; such a move reflects enhanced customer loyalty which directly correlates to an increase in profits between 25 to 125 percent. Hennig-Thurau et al. (2002) noted that aspects such as customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and commitment are integral factors contributing successfully to the concept of relationship marketing. Gronross (1990) supports this view by suggesting that as a discipline marketing concerns itself with the management of relationships, a tenet which is needed more importantly in the service sector, and the commentator postulates that in a context where tangibility of products and goods is non-existent, traditional concepts of marketing cannot effectively deal with the issues related to service-related businesses. An intriguing view of modern marketing has been presented by Edgett & Parkinson (1993) who claim that traditionalist marketing approaches maybe equally effective in service sector marketing, where customer-orientation and customer relationship management is the primary focus. Krueger et al. (2003) on the contrary argue that technological advancements and the wide-spread popularity of the Internet across the globe, has contributed towards changing business dynamics an example of which is the availability of legal online music. It is argued that with regards to the marketing of goods, an ...Download file to see next pagesRead More