Marketing Strategy For a Service-based Organization

The philosophy of marketing concept and marketing management in service organizations are merely outward manifestations of a basic and important development in marketing. In the past decade, marketing executives in service organizations have adopted a new perspective. Embracing a systems perspective, they tend to see marketing operations as complete systems. Marketing management in service organizations is responsible for designing and directing a total system of marketing action to achieve predetermined objectives. The systems approach is essential for effective decision making, for the utilization of models in marketing, and for the application of computer technology. Systems analysis is a managerial breakthrough, somewhat akin to breakthroughs in various sciences, and has given rise to powerful concepts and tools of analysis. The systems approach is based on the work of Von Bertalanffy, who is credited with coining the phrase "general systems theory." He conceived of a set of objects, their interrelationships, and their attributes as systems. The objects were merely components of a system. Therefore, any groups of marketing activities and elements that can be delineated physically or conceptually constitute a system. Marketing systems in service organizations are collections of entities that form coherent groups. The fact that entities or activities are capable of being understood as a coherent group, rather than as a collection of parts, makes them a system. This conceptual insight has led to the development of new disciplines such as industrial dynamics and systems engineering (1). In marketing, the systems approach turns on the central theme that marketing reality occurs in systems. A service organization, part of it, or...

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