The Store

This is my first time writing in this blog (or any blog for that matter),

and my job was to focus on stores, so I read a book called Kauppa – Toiminnan suunnittelusta markkinointiin. Roughly translated it means The Store – From planning the operation to marketing, and as the title says, it covered most of the things you should think about when planning a store and its operations.

Havumäki, Heidi. Jaranka, Eila. 2006. Kauppa - Toiminnan suunnittelusta markkinointiin.

It was a really interesting book to read and I learned a lot from it. 

Changes in demographic has led to that there has to be many different kinds of stores for the customers: stores with a big selection and low prices for the families, the small corner shops that are open late and that sells ready meals for the single people. The increased competition and the customer’s price knowledge have led to that the shops and shop chains have had to increase their efficiency.  The increased efficiency has led to that more shops has joined a network of shop chains, and fewer and fewer independent shops are around

.

Most of the customers choose their store for everyday shopping based on its location. Mostly on weekends customers go further away to buy their groceries, and at the same time they also buy more. There have however been changes in consumer behavior over the last couple of years. People tend to shop less frequent per week, but shop more when they do go shopping.

Most of the stores in Finland today belong to a multiple store chain. Shops that belong to a big store chain usually all look alike; all the products it the stores are in the same place. This benefits the stores in many ways, but in my opinion it also have some downsides. Stores that belong to a big store chain seldom get to choose their products themselves – they have to sell what the store chains have in their selection. This isn’t so great for a shopkeeper who would want to sell more locally produced food.

Peace,

- Jonas

It's all about customer relations - the rest is technique

My task was to concentrate on customer relationship management and find out what it all really is about. I read a book about customer relationship management, the book was amazingly easy to read and understand. 

It is easier to strengthen than change

What is CRM all about?

Customer relationship management is an ideology and a management question. It really is all about the customers, who else would buy your products or use your services? That's why it's extremely important to retain the relation with customers. Customer relationships is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions  with current and future customers.

The aim is to:                        

·      Understand the customers

·      Retain customers throught better customer experience

·      Attract new customers

·      Win new clients and contracts increase profitably

It all starts when the customer is conscious of a trademark - hopefully the customer ends up buying the product over and over again - and in addition tells about the product to his/her friends. Word of mouth.

The aim of customer relations is to gain a better understanding of who your customers customers are, what they  buy and how loyal they really are. CRM is also the knowledge of how to segmentate your customer base and how you exploit your customer groups. The difficulty is to find all this information about you customer, you need to know what you’re selling and to who. 

It's not about doing everything right from the beginning -  as long as everything doesn't go wrong.

The important part is to understand the importance of customer relations. The knowledge of the customers . This affects the company’s  profit –and loss.  The most important part is not what the customers say, it's more important to know what they do. It's about how the consumers behave, what they buy and what they want to buy. 

How do you choose your customers? 

You don't have to adapt individually to each and every customer, the important thing is to find the customer group. It is the most effective way and it builds 

If you are all the time chasing new customers, you're running away from your old customers.

Loyalty is a term with many  different dimensions. Functional loyalty is about what kind of emotional experiences the customer. 

So what do we need to remember about customer relationship marketing; attract new customers, retain the customers, understand the customer, find long-term & profitable customers, create customer loyalty and measure the results!

RM-BOKEN, Martina Lundgren

Marianne Kaplan AB, 2008

//Elli