Friday, September 28, 2007

Marketing Management: Week 23

Learn
Policies should benefit the customers. The subject here is policies and not terms. There is nothing wrong with various terms in favor of the company as long as they are reasonable. Terms refer to the payments from customers such as 30 days payment on delivery. Policies cover such items as size of order, warranties, customer support, hours of operation, refunds, alterations and accounting policies.

Unlearn
Any policies that help the company but hurts the customers should be altered or eliminated. This is because there is no point to have policies in place but in the end no customer. I believe this is a true challenge facing each company today.

Relearn
Unfortunately, there are situations where we need to adhere to company policies in order to ensure we operate within the industry code of conduct. For example, it is Pfizer policy not to sponsor the spouse of Dr who we sponsored for a medical conference. If we choose to benefit our customer and go against the company policy (sponsor the spouse in this case) we would probably get the company in trouble as we violate the Pharma Code of Conduct Practices. Therefore, like it or not, company policies may not necessary benefit our customer all the time.