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Modern Customer Relationship Management is becoming more and more demanding. Instead of creating competitive advantages through prices, it is more effective to focus on customer relations and their maintenance. Therefore, corporations have to manage a large amount of information to appeal and to tie customers. Simultaneously, due to the huge spread of mobile devices and the extension of broadband networks communication habits are changing and speed of communication is increasing continuously. Clients and co-workers expect faster responses, not only because of the use of the internet but even more because of the use of mobile services. Finally, the way of working has changed considerably during the past years. Nowadays, employees need flexible access to organizational data as they can manage their working time mostly by themselves. Flexible access may be necessary at customer appointments, at the home office or during business trips. Accordingly, mobile software solutions which are easily operable and tailored to individual requirements are in great demand. Mobile CRM is supposed to accommodate this demand. However, the question arises as to whether mobile CRM is really able to meet the companies’ needs and to solve these issues.
The population in the U.S. is getting more and more characterised by cultural diversity. “By 2020, minority groups will account for the majority of the U.S. population.” Especially, the Hispanics are becoming more significant as they represent the biggest minority. To successfully adapt to the changing composition of the population, marketers should adapt and segment the marketers according to the individual taste and preferences of the targeted consumers. Nevertheless, some companies ignore these developments and still use mass marketing to reach the consumers. In the following, the impact and importance of Hispanic-Americans will be examined. Is the Hispanic population worth pursuing? By giving some information on ethnic marketing and ethnic groups, the background and the sub-cultures of Hispanic Americans, evoking the characteristics of the Hispanic shopper and the importance of the Hispanics for the U.S. market, the previous question can be clarified at the end.
Due to continuous changes in consumer needs, new product development (NPD) and innovation are some of a company’s key factors of success and competitiveness. In order to be successful, companies have to understand consumer needs and ‘translate them into new products’1. If changing consumer perceptions and their requirements are not respected by a firm, a product’s sales will decrease as people no longer feel satisfied with the old product and require new functions. Therefore, a major task in business is being close to the customer. In order to collect ideas about product perceptions, institutions and departments within a company staying in direct contact with consumers can be essential. One department that represents a customer-oriented sector is sales, as their day-to-day business includes communication with customers.
However, failure rates of new product launches are still very high. According to a study of Serviceplan and Gfk where 265 newly launched products were analyzed, 70% of these failed and were no longer bought after only one year.2 A firm’s difficulties in generating ideas in the early stages of NPD have been ‘identified as major cause of notoriously high failure rates of new products’3. One possible reason is that information received by the sales department is not communicated clearly enough to Research & Development (R&D), which is in charge of developing new products. For this reason consumer needs are often not adequately integrated into the process of new product development and relevant information concerning their requirements can get lost.
The question as to how the customer-oriented sales department can be better involved into the process of new product development in order to ensure the success of new product introductions will be discussed in the following.
In summer 2015, the FIFA Football World Cup 2006 in Germany was brought back to the public interest due to the publication of corruption allegations against the organising committee, which allegedly bribed FIFA officials in order to bring the World Cup to Germany. Henceforward, the mega-event that was commonly regarded as Germany's summer fairy tale is no longer illuminated in such bright light.