A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services. Valerie Mathieu
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of all locating and identifying each of the actors and then understanding their positions, their evolutions and their strategies in order to anticipate their impact on the company and also to think about collaborative perspectives or the ways in which the company can influence them. This will be the subject of the second part.
1.2.2.2. Positioning the offer
Positioning is the heart of strategic marketing by ensuring that the offer has a clear, distinct and privileged place in the customer’s mind so that it is preferred over competing offers. Positioning is the ultimate step in strategic marketing that begins with market segmentation and continues with segment targeting. These key marketing concepts are essential to the implementation of a customer focus16.
1.2.3. Operational marketing
Operational marketing refers to the implementation of the marketing strategy. The notion of marketing mix is very closely associated with operational marketing.
1.2.3.1. The marketing mix
The marketing mix is the set of tools available to marketing to act on the buyer’s behavior in order to achieve the defined marketing strategy and reach the company’s objectives. McCarthy’s 1960 classification is widely adopted. It groups these tools into four categories called the “4Ps”: product, price, place, promotion.
A good marketing mix must above all be coherent, coherent between actions and coherent with the positioning.
1.2.3.2. Expanding the marketing mix
While the “4Ps” model remains the reference model of operational marketing, the means of action of marketing have been progressively widened. In order to be in phase with the evolution of the markets, it is obviously necessary today to integrate the notions of experience, customer relationship, digitalization, social responsibility and sustainable development. Among the various extensions of the marketing mix concept and more specifically of the “4P” model, it is interesting to look at two of them: the “4Cs” model and the concept of the services marketing mix.
The “4Cs” model, proposed in the 1990s by Robert Lauternborn, is a sort of transposition of the “4Ps” model from the supplier’s point of view to the customer’s one (Lauternborn 1990). Each of the four elements of the 4Ps is translated into a customer benefit in the 4Cs model: customer needs, convenience of buying, cost to satisfy and communication. The “4Cs” model thus emphasizes the customer orientation of marketing even more explicitly.
The concept of the service marketing mix was developed in the early 1980s by service marketing specialists to better integrate the specificity of service17. Three other levers of action were added to the traditional “4Ps” model: people, physical evidence and processes. The people element takes into account the actors who play an essential role in the service relationship. These are the staff in contact, the customer and the other customers. The physical evidence reflects the importance of the physical environment in which the service takes place as well as the different tangible elements that are present during the relationship with the customer. The process refers to all the procedures, mechanisms, activities and flows necessary to provide the service. Each of these three service-specific levers is dealt with in the last part of this book.
1.3. The manager’s customer orientation in response to marketing issues
We must distinguish between function and culture. If marketing as a function is now facing certain challenges, its original culture, that is, the customer at the heart of the company, is more relevant than ever. The customer-oriented company can neither be the exclusive project of a department, even if it is a marketing department, nor the strategic vision of the management committee alone. Making customer orientation a managerial skill is, therefore, a response to the challenges of marketing and a powerful lever for achieving the promises of a customer culture in the company.
1.3.1. Restricted marketing
1.3.1.1. Credibility crisis
Marketing suffers from many prejudices and is often referred to in a pejorative way in order to discredit or denigrate people, approaches and actions. It is considered vulgar, manipulative and even dishonest. In some sectors, it is now clearly in conflict with aspirations for sustainable development and greater social justice. In industrial, technical and scientific environments, where it is well established within large companies and organizations, it is still little appreciated by the players because it is probably not well known. Is it then to counter these negative energies that the title of Chief Customer Officer is now more easily given to the old-fashioned Chief Marketing Officer? Or should we see it as a final questioning of marketing’s actual capacity to take an actual interest in the customer, so that it is necessary to integrate its raison d’être into its title?
1.3.1.2. Difficulty of implementation
It is not uncommon to hear marketers themselves complain about their difficulty in “getting their strategy down”, implementing their plans and actions, and to encourage managers to use the tools they develop. These complaints are particularly common in service and B2B environments, because in these environments, marketing has difficulty achieving its objectives without the collaboration of field managers. Marketing undeniably suffers from being confined to its own function and department, which gives it a bureaucratic image, far from the reality of the field and the operational people. It is, therefore not surprising that its plans, strategies, actions and tools do not arouse much enthusiasm among employees. On the other hand, marketing and customer orientation have always recognized that they cannot be confined to one department or one function, but that they must be implemented with the support and involvement of the entire organization. It has, therefore, become a challenge for the marketing department to succeed in involving all the company’s employees, and especially the managers, in the achievement of its own objectives. The interrelations and interdependencies between marketing, operations and human resources have always been at the heart of the specificity of service management. The questioning of the interrelationships between marketing and sales is going in the same direction, and we are witnessing a merger between the marketing function and the sales function, with the emergence of new marketing and sales departments.
1.3.1.3. Customer orientation as an extension of marketing skills at the managerial level
The solution to involve managers in the implementation of a marketing culture, strategies and tools would be to increase their competence in customer orientation. For companies without a marketing department, the customer-focused manager would become the key player in the deployment of a customer culture. The customer-oriented manager does not have to “do the job” of a marketing department, but must have the ambition to fully integrate the customer into his/her vision and actions. The marketing department and customer orientation will never be in competition but ideally in collaboration and synergy.
Increasing the manager’s customer orientation skills also has the advantage of responding to aspirations for autonomy and freedom in relation to what is often perceived as diktats emanating from headquarters and of moving towards greater horizontality. Customer orientation, by valuing the customer and, therefore, the relationship with the other and the human being, gives meaning to the work that the manager often complains of having lost. If the manager’s job no longer inspires dreams18, wouldn’t enriching it with the confidence that the company has in them for maintaining its most precious asset, the customer, be likely to re-enchant it?
1.3.2. Marketing exposure to technological challenges
1.3.2.1. The digital revolution
The term digital revolution clearly indicates the impact that digital technologies will have on society in general and on business