Introduction
Service marketing is a sub-component of the wide discipline of marketing. It essentially refers to B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Client) services that embrace the marketing of various services such as financial, telecommunication, air travel health care, literacy seminar services, and professional services among others. Marketing of a service is a new area of study, which is rapidly developing since the current world economies are exceedingly characterised by service economies.
The growth is associated with the increased need and development of information sharing enabling technologies such as the development of web 2.0 applications, SMS, and social networking. This paper discusses marketing of literacy seminar services for mature students. These services entail leasing out books and other academic materials through online library checks for the availability of the books, which can then be physically collected from the library premises.
An effort is made to discuss the potential customer base for these services and to evaluate strategies to create and manage relationships with all potential customers for the proposed services (including any internal marketing strategy) and communicating the service to the chosen group of customers including the creation of a service brand and image.
Potential customer base for the service
Identification of scope coupled with the target audience of marketing campaign is a substantial step in the success of the marketing strategies to push for acceptance of a service in the market (Broady-Preston & Steele 2002, p.385). While attempting to set online information literacy talks for mature students, the campaign can only reach people who are logged into the internet or who have accessibility to internet connection.
Consequently, the main target audience that also forms the potential customer base for the services is the largely growing family of bloggers and people interacting through social media. With the increase in information availability and the development of the culture of information sharing, students at secondary and tertiary levels of education resort to the web as the first and the principle preferred source of information (Cmore & Chan 2009). This pool of people forms an immense potential clientele for literacy talk services.
The main challenges of marketing literacy seminar services rest on looking for mechanisms of ensuring that, as the target audience seeks its preferred information, it is also able to link up with the organisation’s information on the available resources, which can provide both qualitative and quantitative data to inform its contributions. One way of achieving this goal is by providing library links in the search results web pages.
Consequently, potential customers can have an overview of books and other materials held in the library, which are related to their seminar talks. This way, customers who are largely driven by the culture of quick accessibility to information that is spread by the era of information sharing through the World Wide Web are able to quickly locate or request for the precise academic materials on offer at the library.
Now, it becomes possible to capture the attention of people who depend on e-books to conduct their researches. If they find that the available e-books do not have substantive information that relates with their seminar themes, they would get an alternative. This alternative is visiting a physical library where they can specifically request books over the counter without going through the manual or even computerised library index.
Strategies to create and manage relationships with all potential customers of the proposed service
The goal for developing strategies for managing customer relationships in the service industry is to ensure that potential customers are both attracted and retained to an organisation. Indeed, scholars have been interested in “allocation of resources between customer acquisitions and retention” (Keller 1998, p.31).
Management of customer relationships requires deployment of the information concerning potential customers to aid in their segmentation in the effort to channel marketing efforts to the strategies that would yield optimal results to the specific segments (Zineldin 2000).
Among the many methods of maintaining positive relationships with customers is keeping the potential clients up to date meaning that the library needs to constantly update the potential customers who mature students for these case with new leases since most of their seminars address current issues. Such an attempt calls for commitment of funds from the library.
Although such a strategy increases the costs of running the library, it is justifiable in the context of Fornell’s (1992) argument, “marketers are quick to recognise that the value of the customer asset (the value that a customer or a potential customer provides a company) is the sum of the discounted net contribution margins of the customer over time” (p.11).
The argument here is that attempting to build customer relationships comes at a cost, which an organisation seeking to retain potential customers must be willing to incur for the overall long time future gains.
Ensuring that the library’s web is updated with the latest academic resources for mature students to provide updated information that matches their talks is critical in the development of the brand image of the organisation. These students are likely to seek renting services from a library where it is easy to access its information on what is available in house.
High probabilities also exist that a library organisation, which is capable to capture the loyalty of both the existing and potential clients, would have a competitive advantage. In the context of the library discussed in this paper, this competitive advantage can be built by ensuring that mature students have a quick access to any resource they are interested in for their seminars.
Marketing services is different from marketing products because in addition to the usual traits of products, services “lack ownership, are intangible, inseparable, and have heterogeneity” (Rust, Zeithaml & Lemon 2004, p.113). Renting of books for mature students to facilitate their seminar services means that the activity is bound by these characteristics.
Consequently, to manage to realise results in attempting to establish good customer relationships, appropriate service marketing mix must be deployed. The service marketing mix includes physical evidence, people, and process. Physical presence prescribes the characteristics of the place of the service offering. The deployment of these aspects in building and managing customer relations is realised through ensuring that the organisation is distinguished clearly from probable and existing competitors.
All book-renting organisations charge fees for the services rendered. However, mature students are more willing to pay for books and other materials. Indeed, a new book is appealing to the eye. The student can concentrate and pay attention to it better than an old book. By capitalising on building the brand image that the library rent books, which are clean and almost new, it becomes possible to build a physical evidence image for the organisation that will make it possible to build positive customer relationships.
Advertising to potential clients of the literary seminar services is a major milestone to enhancing the performance of the organisation. However, the retention of the clients is a function of how well they are treated at the library premises once they come seeking for services to enhance their talks.
This argument underlines the significance of people in helping to build good customer relationships for the library. In fact, according to Broady-Preston and Steele (2002), “people are essential ingredients in service provision: recruiting and training the right staff is required to create a competitive advantage” (p.388).
From the context of the library operations to boost mature students’ seminar services, mature students make their decisions to seek services from the library based on how they are handled online by the communications personnel and or based on how they are handled at the physical premises of the organisation by the sales personnel.
In the quest to build positive customer relationships, it is vital that an effort is made to select people who would represent the interests of the organisation in the most pragmatic way.
This is because, research has shown, “customer make judgments about a service provisions and delivery based on the people representing an organisation” (Rust, Zeithaml & Lemon 2004, p.116). People working in a service organisation are the representative elements of the quality of the service rendered based on the manner in which they interact with clients.
In this extent, it is significant to note that building good customer relationships with the organisation would come from recruitment and selection of persons possessing good interpersonal skills, good knowledge of the services, attitude, and the degree of quality of the service desired to ensure that potential clients (mature students) seek service from the library in the future.
In the list of service-mix that may help to build good customer relationships is the nature of the process of service delivery. A process is “the marketing mix element that looks at the systems used to deliver the service” (Fornell 1992, p.15). It is for this purpose that one of the strategies for building goods customer relationships entails the creation and maintenance of a web based library index. The index is meant to ensure that mature students only go to the library to seek for reading materials that they are sure are available at the premises.
The materials too have to provide information that matches the subject under scrutiny in their seminars. Such a process may ensure development of good customer relationships since it is not only efficient in the delivery of the services because mature students do not have to make repeat trips to the library checking on the status of availability of the reading materials for their talks.
As revealed, people and physical evidence are some of the service-mix elements that service organisations can deploy to build good relationships with potential clients.
Therefore, it is deducible that the central idea behind the selection of appropriate service marketing mix is to create a form of non-verbal communication aiming at spreading the message that the library organisation is the one that offers the best services. Therefore, an image is developed in the potential customers’ mentality that they are most likely to get what they need to satisfy their information needs from the library at any time subject to confirmation of the availability of the requested materials online
In order to build such a customer relationship, it is critical for the organisation to invest in strategies for enhancing both offline and online communication on the nature and quality of the services offered by the organisation to mature students. Since the targeted customers are people who have constant access to internet, selection and investment in an appropriate online communications technology is necessary.
One of such technologies is the campaign management technology, which is a customer relationship management online application, which helps to enhance interactions processes between an organisation and potential clients in an online platform. The main objective of deployed of such technology is to help communicate library services coupled with helping to develop brand loyalty through the development of a positive brand image.
Strategies for Communicating the Service to the chosen group of Mature students, including the creation of a service brand and image
Customers not only buy a product or pay for a service but also pay for the brand image. According to Keller (1998), brand image is a “perception of customers when they see a brand reflected by brand associations in their mind” (p.27). These associations are multidimensional. They contain a myriad of attitudes or dimensions, which are emotionally instigated in relation to customers’ perceptions on the brand quality and the degree to which the brand satisfies the needs of the customers.
Zineldin (2000) notes the relevance of creating service brands and image in a service organisation when he claims, “from customers’ overall picture of their experiences, brand image is important because it will create the customers’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioural responses as the outcomes” (p.21).
In case of the organisation providing library services to mature students to boost their literacy talk seminars, brand image can be strengthened through the creation of publicity among other promotional techniques. In particular, the power of the internet can be utilised as the main approach for developing and creating awareness of the brand.
Using the internet as the means of creating a brand image of the library organisation implies that the internet can serve the dual purpose of distribution coupled with communication.
By making use of social networks and websites, it is possible to influence the quality of the talks based on the library services through ardent communication with the potential customers in the effort to persuade them to seek library services from the organisation. Internet aids in helping an organisation to “focus on enabling customers to find information about services” (Fields 2010, p.14).
Brand image cannot be satisfactorily developed if potential clients (mature students) are not aware of the existence of an organisation that is offering services. Building the brand image can also be enhanced through deployment of technologies such as short message services (SMS). SMS has emerged in the recent past a powerful tool for sending massive short messages to many users within a short time following the developments of telephony technologies (Anbu & Mavuso 2012).
In the effort to create awareness of the existence of an organisation, social media is incredibly helpful. Such a strategy for building positive brand image is opposed to traditional approaches for brand communication in which organisations mainly focused on “controlling what was said about their products and brands by dominating communication channels with carefully planned messaging” (Anbu & Mavuso 2012, p.319).
However, in the modern business environment, control of messages is immensely difficult since the ability of the customer to access information through online interactions has become incredibly sophisticated.
The significance of effecting communication strategies for marketing the service brand through social media is ardent bearing in mind, “today, customer communication takes the form of bilateral dialogue” (Rust, Zeithaml & Lemon 2004, p.117: Cmore & Chan 2009, p.395). This strategy often entails online communication through B2B since the goals is building service brand image of the organisation through social media communication.
The findings indicate that social media and web-based forms of marketing services attract the attention of students seeking material to include in their researches. Consequently, it is important that librarians take proactive efforts to engage mature students through blogs coupled with other web 2.0 applications in the efforts to make them have access to library renting services to enrich their seminar talks.
Conclusion
Marketing of services is different from marketing of products since the two have different characteristics. This paper argued that, in order to set up information literacy talks for mature students, it is important to consider service-marketing mix to determine the characteristics of the target audience of marketing campaigns.
The paper discussed marketing of new library services through online marketing strategies in which social media and web 2.0 applications were presented as crucial in helping to communicate the service chosen for mature students to boost their information literacy talks.
References
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