- Business-to-Business Marketing
Case study
You are the newly recruited Marketing Manager in your country for the company ‘Office Supplies and Services’. This is a company with a presence in many countries around the world and is in the business of selling office supplies and systems such as photocopiers and their paper, office furniture, filing boxes, computer consumables such as USB pens, blank DVDs and CDs, pens, pencils etc. The company will also take on service work such as office refurbishment. In each country, the company has a range of customers from small companies through to non-profit organizations (such as local government authorities), health organizations (such as hospitals) to central Government departments.
At present, sales are carried out by a team of sales people who have geographic sales territories but their sales responsibilities are based on the history of the company, focused on office supplies for the pre-computer age when most profit was made from paper based product sales such as ledgers and ‘carbon paper’.
You were recruited because the company management believed that the way the company operated was not as profitable as it could be and that a new marketing approach using modern marketing methods would give the company more success in the future.
Assignment task(s)
The company Directors have asked you to address a number of questions and produce a report with your proposals for the improvement of the marketing operations. These are laid out as the 4 tasks set out below. Please complete all four tasks.
Task 1 – 25 Marks
Brennan, Canning and McDowell (2007) proposed a way of classifying products as Installations, Accessories, Maintenance Supplies, Raw Materials, Manufactured Materials and Business Services.
In looking at the market for office supplies and services, identify (3) potential product offerings that belong to each of the above product classifications and critically assess how well this classification structure fits the office supplies and services product range as described in the case study.
Discuss how using this structure to categorise a company’s product range can bring about improvements to its marketing operations.
Task 2 – 25 Marks
You have a good understanding of customer relations and believe that the structuring of the salesforce to use key account management (KAM) would improve sales productivity.
Discuss how you would restructure the salesforce using KAM principles, detailing how you would identify the key accounts and highlight the intrinsic benefits this approach would bring compared with existing transaction sales approaches.
Task 3 – 25 Marks
An alternative method of becoming more sales effective is to improve the way the company communicates with existing and potential customers.
Assess how the AIDA framework can be used to improve sales through better communications to both key account customers and non-key account customers.
Task 4 – 25 Marks
Market segmentation and application of the marketing mix are ways in which business to business marketing companies optimize their marketing operations.
Critically assess how these concepts can be used by the Office Supplies and Services company to maximise customers and potential customers in your country.
Note:
Wright 2500words for this assignment
