Where is ‘marketing’ headed from ‘social marketing concept’? ‘Customer Life Growth Monitoring Concept’ seems to offer promise!

Where is ‘marketing’ headed from ‘social marketing concept’? ‘Customer Life Growth Monitoring Concept’ seems to offer promise!

A marketer who is interested in keeping with him his customer quite longer or for ever have till now traversed many stages- from production-orientation to sales-orientation to product-orientation to marketing-orientation to social marketing orientation. The evolution of marketer’s love and protective inclination for the customer extended further to the creation of life-time customer value and co-creation. These apart, the Porter’s value chain analysis has set out to explore all possibilities of giving the best service to the customer. What is the next marketing philosophy that can guide the marketer’s efforts? Is there any space left for further exploration by the marketing scholars?

What all the previous concepts fail to capture and can do further is: can the marketer monitor the growth ladder of the customer’s life and the corresponding upgrading of the customer to the next life stage in terms of what the marketer’s next product category can offer a customer. For example, an automobile company has sold its customer a scooter, which has later been replaced with a bike, which, in turn, later by an entry-level car, and later a medium-range car, and later, a luxury car.
The marketer’s main function of this philosophy is : take back the product first sold at its salvage value and give the upgraded version of product that new life stage of the customer requires, and later next cycle starts with a new product category as required by the growing customer. In the process, alongside of it, the customer’s network and their references are also brought into the marketer’s fold.

The main planks of the this concept are:

The customer is under eternal protective cover of the customer, which is an aggressive pursuit of customer’s life time value.

A customer’s life success growth graph is monitored for a very long period by the marketer by giving the customer’s product upgrades for ever.

His ramshackle clunkers are taken care of the marketer.

His network of relations are also tracked to bring them into the marketer’s fold.
Research scholars are challenged to take this further and establish its value for the marketer.

Reaching AICTE helpdesk- It is a pie in the sky!

Dr. Kapil Sibal wants to make his presence felt. He appears to be seriously engaged in revamping the higher education system, and as part of it, he has set out to streamline the AICTE approval process. Accordingly, he has made it mandatory for every institution to upload their details on AICTE website.

But alas! The website is not at all accessible and is hardly open to feed the details into. Realizing the reality, AICTE has extended the time of uploading from 28-2-10 to 15-3-10. Now the accessibility is a little better. But problems that are staring in the face are those related to payments and helpdesk services.

1. Payments are not acknowledged although about 15 are completed after payment; payments are supposed to be acknowledged within 3 or 4 days, but they are not. It is difficult to know when they will be acknowledged. That apart, the worst inconvenience that every institution faces is that further details cannot be uploaded until the first payment is acknowledged. AICTE is sitting on the payments like a dog in the manger. To get some reply, one can call the helpdesk.

2. But helpdesk is the worst ever disorganized system known to mankind. None of the four numbers they have given are reachable; they are either engaged or don’t answer till doom! It is the height of disorganization. Quite strangely, one number they gave is an invalid number.

That is the level of service that Ministry of Higher Education/ Government Of India is prepared to give to their stakeholders!