Marketing Short Notes- Call center

A call center is a centralized department to which phone calls from current and potential customers are directed. Call centers can handle inbound and/or outbound calls, and be located either within a company or outsourced to another company that specializes in handling calls.

In other words, a call center may be defined as, - a work environment in which the main business is mediated by computer and telephone-based technologies that enable the efficient distribution of incoming calls (or allocation of outgoing calls) to available staff, and permit customer-employee interaction to occur simultaneously with use of display screen equipment and the instant access to, and inputting of, information. This includes parts of companies dedicated to this activity, as well as the whole company.

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today’s business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries.

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Marketing-JAIBB Short Notes-Value Chain

The value chain describes the full range of activities that firms and workers do to bring a product from its conception to its end use and beyond. This includes activities such as design, production, marketing, distribution and support to the final consumer.

The activities that comprise a value chain can be contained within a single firm or divided among different firms. Value chain activities can produce goods or services, and can be contained within a single geographical location or spread over wider areas.

In other words, Value chains are an integral part of strategic planning for many businesses today. A value chain refers to the full life cycle of a product or process, including material sourcing, production, consumption and disposal/recycling processes.

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Marketing Short Notes on- 'Customer loyalty'

Customer loyalty is all about attracting the right customer, getting them to buy, buy often, buy in higher quantities and bring one even more customers. However, that focus is not how one builds customer loyalty. 

One builds loyalty by- 

1. Keeping touch with customers using email marketing, thank you cards and more. 

2. Treating your team well so they treat your customers well. 

3. Showing that you care and remembering what they like and don’t like. 

4. You build it by rewarding them for choosing you over your competitors. 

5. You build it by truly giving a damn about them and figuring out how to make them more success, happy and joyful. 

In short, one builds customer loyalty by treating people how they want to be treated.

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Define Window dressing. How Window dressing works?

Definition of Window dressing
Window dressing is a term that describes the act of making a company's performance, particularly its financial statements, look more attractive than what it is in actual.

A strategy used by mutual fund and portfolio managers near the year or quarter end to improve the appearance of the portfolio/fund performance before presenting it to clients or shareholders. To window dress, the fund manager will sell stocks with large losses and purchase high flying stocks near the end of the quarter. These securities are then reported as part of the fund's holdings.

How It Works/Example:
Let's assume Company XYZ wants to look attractive to potential acquirers. It might do some window dressing by announcing much higher sales projections, obtaining and holding a lot of cash, or making other announcements that are

likely to raise the stock price, even if only for a short time. The objective is to make a favorable impression on potential acquirers.

Companies are not the only ones to engage in window dressing. Mutual funds do it as well, often by cutting their losses and buying high-fliers (sometimes that are not even in the fund's investment sector) near the end of a reporting period.

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Define Millionaire Deposit Scheme (MDS) with its feature and benefits

Definition of Millionaire Deposit Scheme (MDS)

Millionaire Deposit Scheme (MDS) Account is a time specified monthly deposit scheme for clients where the deposited money will become one million on maturity.

Features and Benefits:
1. Tenor: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 year’s term;
 

2. Deposit on monthly installment basis;
 

3. Attractive rate of interest;
 

4. Account can be opened at any working day of the month;
 

5. Monthly installment can be deposited through a standing debit instruction from the designated CD/SB Account;
 

6. Monthly installment can be deposited in advance;
 

7. An account can be transferred from one branch to another branch of the bank;
 

8. Credit facility for maximum of 2 years can be availed at any time during the period of the scheme;
 

9. Allowed to open more than one MDS Account for different amount at any branch of the Bank;

But these features and benefits can be varied bank to bank.

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Marketing Short Note-`Brand Equity'

Brand Equity is the value and strength of the Brand that decides its worth. It can also be defined as the differential impact of brand knowledge on consumer’s response to the Brand Marketing. Brand Equity exists as a function of consumer choice in the market place. The concept of Brand Equity comes into existence when consumer makes a choice of a product or a service. It occurs when the consumer is familiar with the brand and holds some favourable positive strong and distinctive brand associations in the memory.

Brand Equity can be determined by measuring:
• Returns to the Share-Holders.
• Evaluating the Brand Image for various parameters that are considered significant.
• Evaluating the Brand’s earning potential in long run.
• By evaluating the increased volume of sales created by the brand compared to other brands in the same class.
• The price premium charged by the brand over non-branded products.
• From the prices of the shares that an organization commands in the market (specifically if the brand name is identical to the corporate name or the consumers can easily co-relate the performance of all the individual brands of the organization with the organizational financial performance.

Factors contributing to Brand Equity
• Brand Awareness
• Brand Associations
• Brand Loyalty
• Perceived Quality
• Other Proprietary Brand Assets

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Marketing Short Note-`Competitive strategy '

Competitive strategy refers to how a company competes in a particular business. Competitive strategy is concerned with how a company can gain a competitive advantage through a distinctive way of competing.

A competitive strategy answers the following questions.

• How do we define our business today and how will we define it tomorrow?

• In what industries or markets will we compete? The intensity of competition in an industry determines its profit potential and competitive attractiveness.

• How will we respond to the competitive forces in these industries or markets (from suppliers, rivals, new entrants, substitute products, customers)?

• What will be our fundamental approach to attaining competitive advantage (low price, differentiation, niche)?

• What size or market position do we plan to achieve?

• What will be our focus and method for growth (sales or profit margins, internally or by acquisition)?

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Marketing Short Notes on 'strategic business unit'

A strategic business unit (SBU) is an organizational subunit that acts like an independent business in many major respects, including the formulation of its own strategic plans and its own marketing strategy. An SBU may share its parent organization’s corporate identity or develop its own brand identity, depending on the degrees of freedom allowed to the management of the division.

A one-fit-all strategic approach would be inadequate in large, diversified organizations and multinational companies. Dividing the corporation’s operations into SBUs increases efficiency and market focus and efficiently organizes the business portfolio of a broadly diversified company.

SBUs are found to be a viable form of organizational sectioning because they ensure that products and product lines are given specialized focus, as if they were developed and marketed by an independent company. Products with smaller sales volumes and profit margins than a corporation’s top performers would still be nurtured and promoted by its SBU. The division would focus on a market sector that may be small in comparison but still constitutes a profitable market niche.

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Marketing Short Notes on 'Marketing Environment'

The introductory definition of the marketing environment stated that, “it is the sum of the total of the factors or variables which potentially influence the marketing of a product or service".
 

In order to expose a list of possible influencing factors, it is necessary to refer to references made to the marketing environment by recognized authors.

It consists of a number of external components (i.e., external sub-environments) which influence the organization’s marketing practices either directly or indirectly. In the first chapter of this book, it is indicated that the evolution of the marketing concept and the stages through which it passed, was an outgrowth of the changes in the surrounding environment. This indicates that examining and responding to the marketing environment is considered an important practice for the success of any organization. It is worthwhile to note that marketing is probably the function that is most influenced by the external environment in an organization.

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Marketing Short Notes on 'Consumerism'

Consumerism is the belief that personal wellbeing and happiness depends to a very large extent on the level of personal consumption, particularly on the purchase of material goods. The idea is not simply that wellbeing depends upon a standard of living above some threshold, but that at the center of happiness is consumption and material possessions. A consumerist society is one in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”. The general view of life in a consumerist society is consumption is good, and more consumption is even better.

Consumerism --the consumption of goods and services in excess of one’s basic needs, usually in greater and greater quantities --is not a new phenomenon, and early examples of consumerism can be traced back to the fist human civilizations. A significant consumerist tide hit Europe and North America in the mid-18th Century as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the transformation of Western Europe’s and North America’s economies.

The mechanization of a number of processes such as farming freed a certain percentage of the workforce from farming, fuelled both the Industrial Revolution and population growth. As industrialization created the conditions for mass production and mass consumption, for the first time in history, immense quantities of manufactured goods were suddenly available at outstandingly low prices, and thus made available to nearly everyone.

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Marketing Short Notes on 'Customer satisfaction'

Customer satisfaction is defined as a customer’s overall evaluation of the performance of an offering to date. This overall satisfaction has a strong positive effect on customer loyalty intentions across a wide range of product and service categories.

The satisfaction judgment is related to all the experiences made with a certain business concerning its given products, the sales process, and the after- sale service. Whether the customer is satisfied after purchase also depends on the offer’s performance in relation to the customer’s expectation. Customers form their expectation from past buying experience, friends’ and associates’ advice, and marketers’ and competitors’ information and promises.
Factors which determine the extent of expectations are: customer needs, total customer value and total customer cost. It is mentioned by researchers who study customer choice that choosing a product or service is only one of the stages customers go through.

There is general agreement that: Satisfaction is a person’s feelings of pleasure or disappointment resulting from comparing a product’s perceived performance (or outcome) in relation to his or her expectations. Based on this review, customer satisfaction is defined as the result of a cognitive and effective evaluation, where some comparison standard is compared to the actually perceived performance. If the perceived performance is less than expected, customers will be dissatisfied. On the other hand, if the perceived performance exceeds expectations, customers will be satisfied. Otherwise, if the perceived expectations are met with performance, customers are in an indifferent or neutral stage.

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