Customer

A customer is an individual or business that purchases another company's goods or services. Most public-facing businesses compete with other companies to attract customers, either by aggressively advertising their products or by lowering prices, in an effort to expand their customer bases.

The Customer Concept

The Customer concept is a 4 stage model which shows how the organization can achieve growth by capturing and retaining its customers. The customer concept model can be used to determine where the organization stands in terms of serving its customers. This model can be used in product market as well as the service market. Here are the four stages of the customer concept

source: Marketing91

1) Starting point Over here the customer is just an individual who falls in a Target group. Thus the first thing which the organization needs is to know the Segmentation, Targeting and positioning. Once the customer has been defined its time to move to the next phase.

2) Focus In this stage, the organization needs to focus on the customers needs and wants as well as the value it provides for the customer. What is it that the customer exactly wants? . It is very important that the organization stays in sync with the continuous changes in the business world. Thus it needs time to time gap analysis as well as market surveys and research to focus on customers needs and wants.

3) Means What are the means available for the organization to deliver value to the customer? In this stage, it is very important for the organization to connect each and every function of the organization so as to form a Value Chain. The services should be connected to sales which in turn should be in sync with the manufacturing so on and so forth. You can refer the value chain to understand how customer value can be created in an organization. Along with this, integration of multiple sales channels is also important.

4) Ends Customer share, customer loyalty and customer lifetime value are three concepts which can define the customer equity of the organization. Thus this is the last stage of the customer concept wherein the organization has to ensure that it has kept its customers satisfied, that the organizations customers have become “repeat customers” and finally that they remain a customer for a lifetime.