Customer satisfaction is a critical factor to the potential success or failure of a business. By implementing the latest marketing strategies, organizations can better withstand the competitive market. Strategic Marketing Management and Tactics in the Service Industry is an essential reference publication that features the latest scholarly research on service strategies for competitive advantage across industries. Covering a broad range of topics and perspectives such as customer satisfaction, healthcare service, and microfinance, this book is ideally designed for students, academics, practitioners, and professionals seeking current research on best practices to build rapport with customers.

Strategic Marketing Management (5th edition) offers a comprehensive framework for strategic planning and outlines a structured approach to identifying, understanding, and solving marketing problems. For business students, the theory advanced in this book is an essential tool for understanding the logic and the key aspects of the marketing process. For managers and consultants, this book presents a conceptual framework that will help develop an overarching strategy for day-to-day decisions involving product and service design, branding, pricing, promotions, and distribution. For senior executives, the book provides a big-picture approach for developing new marketing campaigns and evaluating the success of ongoing marketing programs.

Examine essential marketing disciplines and weapons! This essential book will show you how to design a strategic marketing plan for any brand, product, service, or business! It explains all of the major marketing disciplines and familiarizes you with the marketing “weapons arsenal.” It also teaches you to conduct a marketing audit, provides helpful sample worksheets and forms and includes case examples, a glossary of marketing terms, and appendixes discussing sources of “marketing intelligence” and professional marketing associations. This single volume provides a step-by-step process (with short, clear examples) of how to develop a custom plan to fit any business. In addition, it defines all of the business terms you’ll find inside and lists additional resources to draw upon. With Marketing Your Business: A Guide to Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan, you will explore: the process of selecting the right strategy by defining your business strategy, assessing the most relevant focal points, and choosing the marketing strategy that will work best for you the arsenal of current marketing weaponry--advertising, budgeting, promotions, pricing, sales, database marketing, public relations, packaging, legal issues, and more! the nature of strategic marketing plans-competitive and environmental assessments, mission statements, slogans, budgeting, goals and objectives, etc. key checklists and 13 sample work forms that will help you formulate your plan and much more! Ideal for use by educators and students as well as businesspeople, Marketing Your Business brings together everything you need to know to develop an effective strategic marketing plan and put it into action!

The days of professionals simply hanging a shingle and waiting for clients to beat a path to the door are long gone. Professionals must realize that their services, no matter how good they are, simply will not sell themselves. Services marketing is the key to the game and here is the most concise, easy-to-understand, jam-packed source of services marketing. Professional Services Marketing provides a very readable and simple introduction to the marketing process for the professional service environment. It gives professionals an inexpensive way to successfully develop a strong client base and grow in a competitive marketplace. Distinguished expert and international authority Fred Crane offers a realistic overview of the marketing process and discusses the characteristics and difficulties involved in marketing and managing professional services.

What’s your organization’s marketing strategy? Does your company meet real life marketing challenges head on and with success? This book provides a unique approach by using your organization’s mission and vision statements to guide the development of marketing goals, strategies, and tactics. It uses real market examples to demonstrate the development of effective marketing strategies. Central to the development of marketing strategy is the use of the marketing mix of price, place, product, and promotion. This book neatly weaves the process of developing such a marketing strategy with examples given to clarify the theories and guide the reader through the strategic marketing planning process. If you are a manager, business student, or an executive, this book will help you grow an established business or start a new one with smart management techniques and processes that are critical to executing successful marketing strategies. The examples used are from large and small organizations in which the author was personally involved.

Two-thirds of rapid-growth firms use written business plans, according to Price, Waterhouse, Coopers 1998 Trendsetter Barometer. The survey also states that firms with written plans grow faster, achieve a higher proportion of revenues from new products and services, and enable CEOs to manage more critical business functions. How to Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan is both innovative and pragmatic in its approach. It explains how to combine the strategic vision of long-term business planning with the action-oriented thrust of a short-term marketing plan. Planning forms and guidelines for customizing your own Strategic Market Plan (SMP) are available for download from the CRC Press website. Just go to the download tab located with the book's description.Actual case histories - from companies such as Campbell Soup, Co., Texas Instruments, Inc., and Quaker State Corp. - illustrate how business-building opportunities translate into strategies and tactics. They demonstrate the compelling relationship between internal organizational functions and external market conditions, the long- and short-term strategic marketing issues and the advantages of developing an SMP.Strategic market planning shapes the future of business. In its broadest dimension it sets in motion actions that impact long term prosperity. How to Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan gives you the tools to generate a credible strategic marketing plan so your organization can survive in the 21st century.

Strategic Marketing Management: The Framework outlines the essentials of marketing theory and offers a structured approach to identifying and solving marketing problems. This book presents a strategic framework to guide business decisions involving the development of new offerings and the management of existing products, services, and brands.

`A text that successfully bridges the gap between academic theorizing and practitioner applicability because it uses multiple real-world examples/mini-cases of management techniques to illustrate the well-researched academic theoretical foundations of the book′ - Creativity and Innovation Management `A complete and useful treatment of the domain of product and service decisions. This book is unique in its treatment, dealing with product and service portfolio evaluation, new product/service development and product/service elimination in an integrated manner. Enlivened by many mini-cases, the book provides a soup-to-nuts approach that will prove very attractive for students and be a valuable reference for managers as well. Highly recommended′ - Gary L Lilien, Distinguished Research Professor of Management Science, Penn State University `Product and Services Management (PSM) is a welcome, up to date summary of the key issues facing firms in developing and refreshing their portfolios. The examples and cases bring the academic arguments clearly into focus and demonstrate the crucial role of PSM in leading the overall strategy of the firm′ - Professor Graham Hooley, Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Aston University, Birmingham `Managers responsible for and students interested in product portfolio decisions previously had to consult several sources for obtaining up-to-date information; books on new product development, articles on service development, readers on product management, and frameworks for product evaluation and termination. With the book Product and Services Management the reader obtains four-in-one. Avlonitis and Papastathopoulou reveal in a compelling and comprehensive manner why product decisions are the cornerstone of modern marketing and business, and illustrate the theory with numerous mini-cases from Europe and elsewhere. A must read for everyone with a passion for products′ - Dr Erik Jan Hultink, Professor of New Product Marketing, Delft University of Technology This book provides a holistic approach to the study of product and services management. It looks at the key milestones within a product′s or service life cycle and considers in detail three crucial areas within product management, namely product/service portfolio evaluation, new product/service development and product/service elimination. Based on research conducted in Europe and North America, this book includes revealing cases studies that will help students make important connections between theory and practice. The pedagogical features provided in each chapter include chapter introduction, summary, questions and a further reading section. Additional material for instructors include PowerPoint slides and indicative answers to each chapter′s questions. This book is written for undergraduate and postgraduate students of business administration who are pursuing courses in marketing, product portfolio management, new product development and product policy.

Strategic Marketing Management: Theory and Practice offers a systematic overview of the fundamentals of marketing theory, defines the key principles of marketing management, and presents a value-based framework for developing viable market offerings. The theory presented stems from the view of marketing as a value-creation process that is central to any business enterprise. The discussion of marketing theory is complemented by a set of practical tools that enable managers to apply the knowledge contained in the generalized frameworks to specific business problems and market opportunities. The information on marketing theory and practice contained in this book is organized into eight major parts. The first part defines the essence of marketing as a business discipline and outlines an overarching framework for marketing management that serves as the organizing principle for the information presented in the rest of the book. Specifically, we discuss the role of marketing management as a value-creation process, the essentials of marketing strategy and tactics as the key components of a company’s business model, and the process of developing an actionable marketing plan. Part Two focuses on understanding the market in which a company operates. Specifically, we examine how consumers make choices and outline the main steps in the customer decision journey that lead to the purchase of a company’s offerings. We further discuss the ways in which companies conduct market research to gather market insights in order to make informed decisions and develop viable courses of action. Part Three covers issues pertaining to the development of a marketing strategy that will guide the company’s tactical activities. Here we focus on three fundamental aspects of a company’s marketing strategy: the identification of target customers, the development of a customer value proposition, and the development of a value proposition for the company and its collaborators. The discussion of the strategic aspects of marketing management includes an in-depth analysis of the key principles of creating market value in a competitive context. The next three parts of the book focus on the marketing tactics, viewed as a process of designing, communicating, and delivering value. Part Four describes how companies design their offerings and, specifically, how they develop key aspects of their products, services, brands, prices, and incentives. In Part Five, we address the ways in which companies manage their marketing communication and the role of personal selling as a means of persuading customers to choose, purchase, and use a company’s offerings. Part Six explores the role of distribution channels in delivering the company’s offerings to target customers by examining the value-delivery process both from a manufacturer’s and a retailer’s point of view. The seventh part of the book focuses on the ways in which companies manage growth. Specifically, we discuss strategies used by companies to gain and defend market position and, in this context, address the issues of pioneering advantage, managing sales growth, and managing product lines. We further address the process of developing new market offerings and the ways in which companies manage the relationship with their customers. The final part of this book presents a set of tools that illustrate the practical application of marketing theory. Specifically, Part Eight delineates two workbooks: a workbook for segmenting the market and identifying target customers and a workbook for developing the strategic and tactical components of a company’s business model. This part also contains examples of two marketing plans—one dealing with the launch of a new offering and the other focused on managing an existing offering.