Individual Reflection Paper

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AB1501 MARKETING

Individual Reflection Paper

Submitted on 13 April 2017

Tutorial Group No. 13

Team No. 5

Yip Jian Xing (U1610941J)

Heartland Chefs

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Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION        1

2 LEARNING POINTS        1-5

2.1 Differences in service marketing        1

2.2 Management & Credibility of Social Media        2

2.3 Relevance of traditional media in marketing        4

2.4 Learning insights on presentation                                                         5

3 CONCLUSION        5

4 REFERENCES        6-7

1 Introduction

Having been in the shoes of a customer my whole life, AB1501 has allowed me to think from the perspective of a marketer. The main highlight would be the designing of a consumer driven marketing strategy (Heartland Chefs). It has allowed me to realise the importance of building a strategy around the customer, while still being grounded by trends and quantitative research. In this paper, I will be presenting some of my more prominent takeaways from this course.

2 Learning Points

2.1 Differences in service marketing

One challenge we encountered while formulating our marketing strategy was the nature and characteristics of service marketing. The intangibility and variability characteristics affected the way in which we crafted our marketing plan and created value for targeted customers.

Unlike products, services are non-physical and cannot be “possessed”. Hence, difficulty arises when one wants to see, touch or evaluate the quality of the service (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). We understood that customers instead make their assessments based on past experience, word of mouth and even the interface or aesthetic of the application. We incorporated this by ensuring that our application is user friendly and informative in order to instil trust and confidence that the customer will receive a promised result. Necessary information such as the ingredients used, details of the chef, chef reviews as well as the estimated time of arrival of the orders will be provided for customers to make better decisions. We also included tangible signs of quality in the form of in-app reviews and a referral program to stimulate word-of mouth communications.

The next key difference is variability. Unlike the marketing of physical products which are usually consistent in quality and features, the provision of services, however, includes a large measure of the “human element”, resulting in potential variability (Langeard, 1981). My group found it a challenge for both vendors and delivery service providers to ensure a consistent quality of service and many potential problems were flagged out during our proposal presentation. To tackle the issue, we introduced various quality controls. For our delivery service provider, speed of service is an important aspect of customer service (Virgillito, 2016) and we tried to keep it consistent by restricting the number of orders and service areas for each delivery agent, resulting in the freshness of food. Food quality is another important aspect of customer service and was addressed through the control of ingredients that go into the food, as well as vendor training and certification. An in-chat function also allowed customers to communicate requests to vendors, as well as to reduce potential variability.

Our service marketing project involved many considerations revolving around the customer that is refreshing and stimulated several discussions during the tutorial sessions. The project teams who did products placed a huge focus on promoting the points of product differentiation, and to a certain extent failed to account other motivators of consumer purchase, such as hedonism and customer delight (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 1996). There are service elements that should be considered even if the business is selling a product. One example will be Group Three’s (Cime) modular spectacles. While focusing on product differentiation, they did not touch on including personalised services and follow up services in the form of professional eye checks and consultations, missing out on the element of customer delight.