Customer Service, Ethical Marketing Customer

Customer Service, Ethical Marketing

Customer service and ethical marketing

Customer service

The editors at Inside CRM (customer relationship management) have an undying attention towards the assessment of customer services across a wide array of sectors, industries and institutions. One notable article they wrote is about Apple Inc., a leading company of the it industry, and which provides an example of business success. The title of this article is rather edificatory for the contents of the works, namely "11 effective strategies Apple uses to create loyal customers. Complete solutions, familiar formats and "the cool factor" keep customers coming back."

The editors at Inside CRM start their article by presenting the immense power of Apple to gather customers who sleep outside the Apple stores in order to be the first to buy a new gadget. And they also state that this popularity is not the result of luck, but more so the result of a "well-thought-out plan to deliver strong products and to create an Apple culture" (Inside CRM).

An important part in the success of Apple Inc. is represented by the company's commitment to making its customers loyal, through the implementation of a powerful customer service program, but also through the development and implementation of other strategic efforts which increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this order of ideas, the editors of Inside CRM point out to the usage of 11 distinctive solutions to creating customer loyalty, as follows:

The creation of stores which only sell the Apple gadgets

The provision of complete solutions through the creation of complementary products and services (e.g. iPods and iTunes)

The association of the company's product with a perception of being "cool and hip"

The provision of a diversified palette of Apple products, services and solutions

The increased presence of Apple through company or product news and analyses within the media

The promotion and retail of the Apple products in classrooms, which support both marketing goals, as well as education

The creation and delivery of products of high quality levels, created at high standards of functionality and based on the research conducted within the market place

The organizational decision to outsource services which did not represent core organizational operations; in other words, the company stuck to the creation of high quality and popular items and outsourced adjacent services

The insurance of consistency in all Apple products, which have the same basic architecture

The integration of innovation within the Apple products, and last

The creation of attractiveness for the products so that the customers would remain interested in the Apple gadgets (Inside CRM).

All in all, Apple Inc. has one of the strongest positions within the global market place and this is due to a powerful business model. At the level of customer service, the provision of solutions is rather integrated and obvious at the corporate level. Nevertheless, improvements could be created if the company were to spend more time in individualizing customer services in the meaning of creating closer and more personal interactions with its customers in order to collect feedback and provide tailored assistance, when necessary.

2. Ethical marketing

The business climate of the contemporaneous society is suffering important challenges as a result of numerous changes in the society. On the one hand for instance, there is the increasing social pressure on the economic agents to operate in a more environmentally friendly manner in which they reduce their negative impact upon the natural environment. On the other hand, there is also the weakening economy, which forces the economic agents to be more reserved in their investments.

While this approach has been implemented by most of the economic agents, British retailer Marks and Spencer argues that the economic crisis is no excuse for the business institutions to postpone their green initiatives. They as such invested £200 million in their own ethical campaign, and they now implement it, while in the same time, criticizing other companies for having renounced their initiatives in the wake of the economic crisis. Marks and Spencer promoted messages such as the ones below:

"Above all, doing the right thing is doing it today, because our planet can't wait until tomorrow"

"For some retailers, green went out of fashion as quickly as it came in"

These messages carried out through the ethical marketing campaign of Marks and Spencer are presented by Mark Sweney in a 2009 article in the Guardian, entitled "Marks and Spencer trumpets ethical initiatives in ad campaign. M&S's national ad campaign pushes £200m ethical plan and chides rivals for retreating from commitment to green issues."

Aside from presenting the messages criticizing the other economic agents for withdrawing from the initiatives of environmental responsibility, the article points out that the campaign of Marks and Spencer would also reveal the company's commitment to sustainable solutions for its buyers and its commitments to high quality items. Additionally, the article briefly presents some efforts made by the Advertising Standards Authority to reduce the incidence of artificial claims of ethical and environmental campaigns. The regulator has been met with numerous situations in which the campaigns were announcing environmentally friendly products, that in essence proved to not be so. Still, the article does not present the stand of the Advertising Standards Authority in the case of the Marks and Spencer campaign, but this is probably because investigations are only launched in the aftermath of accusations.

All in all, the article presented in the Guardian is rather simplistic, without a clear analysis of the campaign, and it is limited to presenting the stand of the company. At the level of the company and its ethical campaign, a first improvement that could be added is represented by the elimination of the attacks towards other companies. Marks and Spencer should create not only an environmental campaign, but an ethical one too, in which they do not attack others; in the end, this attack reflects on the very image of the company and the impact is a negative one.