Customer Service and Quality Assessment

Marketing Concepts

• Mystery shopping helps assess customer service quality and competitive pricing strategies.
• Continuous improvement relates to service delivery processes and quality monitoring and recovery.

Marketing Research

• The marketing concept emerged as a response to the selling concept's aggressive promotion, increasing global competition, and the production concept's efficiency focus.
• Marketing research examines market size, market share, brand awareness, and customer motivation to buy.

Pricing Strategies

• Price elasticity research examines how prices impact customer demand.
• Odd-even pricing is based on the psychology that odd prices seem lower and even prices are easier to process.

Marketing Mix

• The marketing mix includes decisions about product design, pricing strategies, promotion planning, but does not include raw material sourcing.
• Marketing strategies include decisions about pricing approaches, promotional campaigns, and product line breadth.

Customer Relationships

• Relationship marketing aims to build long-term customer loyalty.
• Poor quality is a reason for losing customers to competitors.

Marketing Intelligence

• Formal marketing intelligence involves a purposeful, systematic search for information.
• A benefit of marketing intelligence is early warning of competitor moves.

Product and Distribution

• The product concept assumes consumers value product quality and innovation.
• Place utility refers to having the product readily accessible.

Promotion and Sales

• Public relations is a form of non-personal promotion.
• Personal selling involves two-way interaction with buyers.

Marketing Strategies

• Competitive analysis involves assessing competitor strengths and weaknesses, forecasting competitor strategies, and identifying competitive advantages.
• Marketing strategies do not include decisions about raw material purchases.

Customer Needs

• Needs are defined as states of human deprivation backed by purchasing power.
• The selling concept advocates an aggressive selling effort, while the marketing concept emphasizes understanding customer needs.

Research and Analysis

• Mystery consumers help research service quality at competitors.
• The disadvantage of unfocused scanning is information overload, lack of specific insights, and inefficient use of resources.

Marketing Process

• Steps in the marketing research process include gathering secondary data and test marketing.
• Implementing marketing campaigns and product manufacturing are not part of the marketing research process.