Contemporary Issues in Marketing - Essay Example

This paper is about contemporary issues in marketing from the perspective of three companies in the public, private and not for profit sectors. The three companies selected for this paper are Pfizer (Private), Social Security (Public) and WWF – World Wild Life Fund for the nonprofit sector. Every business should understand that, the customer comes first under all circumstances; it does not matter whether the customer if right or not but every business should follow the rules of customer care.

The first rule states that, a customer is always right. Retaining an already existing customer is more than ten times cheaper than getting a new one. One of the effective ways of winning competition is gaining customer loyalty. The best way of building a brand name is ensuring that the customer is satisfied and his or her are expectations met. At first glance, customer relationship management seems just another name for customer relationship management. But customer knowledge management requires a different mindset along a number of key variables.

Customer knowledge managers first and foremost focus on knowledge from the customer, rather than focusing on knowledge about the customer, as characteristic of customer relationship management. In others words, smart companies realize that corporate customers are more knowledgeable than one might think, and consequently seek knowledge through direct interaction with customers, in addition to seeking knowledge about customers from their sales representatives (Christopher & Ballantyne, 1991). Similarly, conventional knowledge managers typically focus on trying to convert employees from knowledge hoarders into knowledge sharers.

This is typically done by intra-net based knowledge sharing platforms. The use of ICT for participatory purposes in general is seen to be more likely to occur in contexts that are less affected by the issues of digital divide. Studies on the digital divide