MBA市场营销dissertation

用XYZ作为公司的名字是为了对其进行保密，该公司成立于1990年，是世界上最大的IT系统集成商和解决方案提供商之一，并且在为海湾合作委员会（海合会）的成员国（除了沙特阿拉伯王国(KSA)之外）效力。XYZ公司起初是美国国际商用机器公司（IBM）的独家经销商。除此之外，在超过20个牢靠的战略伙伴中，XYZ公司是思科（Cisco）的金牌合作伙伴。XYZ公司为客户提供了一个广泛的IT基础设施(硬件、软件和网络)和IT解决方案与服务（咨询、资源部署和一体化的售后支持）。XYZ公司的经验和专业知识影响到了很多行业，特别是电子政务、银行和金融、电信、零售和石油行业(XYZ公司，2013 c)。
 

XYZ公司是许多IT厂商的分销商与合作伙伴，它所涉及的是销售领域而不是关于市场生命周期的生产领域。在战略上，跟任何其他公司一样，XYZ公司的主要目标是增加销售收入、实现利润最大化、通过实现一定的销售目标，与一些国际厂商如美国国际商用机器公司（IBM）或其他公司保持伙伴关系。
 

Company XYZ company name is omitted for confidentiality, founded in 1990, is one of the largest IT system integrators and solutions providers and working in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, except for Kingdom Saudi Arabia (KSA). XYZ started as a sole distributor for IBM. In addition to that, among over 20 solid strategic partnerships, it is a Cisco Gold Partner. XYZ offers an extensive range of IT infrastructure (hardware, software, and networks), IT solutions and services ranging from consulting, resources deployment and integration to after-sales support. XYZ’s experience and expertise extend across several sectors particularly e-Government, Banking and Finance, Telecommunications, Retail and Oil (XYZ, 2013c).
 

XYZ, being distributer and partner to many IT vendors, is concerned with the sales side rather than the production side of the marketing lifecycle. Strategically, the company primary objective is to increase sales revenue to maximize its profit like any other company and to retain its partnership with the international vendors like IBM and others by achieving certain targeted sales. In order to achieve this objective, the company organizational structure and the purpose of its functional units are to promote sales. So, according to Kotler et al. (2009, pp. 25), XYZ can be considered as adopting selling philosophy more than marketing philosophy. Therefore, the role of marketing -though it is not a well-defined functional unit- serves only the sales team in the same way like any other function in the company.
 

公司的营销方式以及营销的作用———XYZ Marketing Approach and the Role of Marketing
 

By applying the studies of Hooley et al. (1990, pp. 7-24) on XYZ, the following result is manifested. Out of the four categories of the marketing role, which are Marketing philosophers, Departmental marketers, Sales supporters and Unsures, the marketing approach of XYZ can be seen belonging to the Sales supporters’ category. Initially, this is due to the previously mentioned objective and strategy of the company. More supportive ideas are discussed from different perspectives.#p#分页标题#e#
 

From the organizational structure perspective, XYZ marketing structure can be viewed informally as composed of a number of account managers who are responsible for any interaction with the customers. In each branch, the account managers report directly to the branch general manager. Each one of them is assigned one or more customer to handle. Any interaction with the customers should be done with their involvement (XYZ, 2013b).
 

The way the account managers in XYZ can be viewed as marketing staff is based on the marketing function framework that is introduced by Moorman and Rust (1999, pp. 180-197) who proposed a framework which acts as a link between the customer and other functional units of the organization. However, those account managers are sales oriented and not marketing oriented. They are getting paid by quota and rewarded for maximizing sales revenues and not for satisfying customers. Hence, they are driven by sales achievements. This contrasts one of the genuine ideas of marketing that was presented by Levitt (1960, pp. 138-149) which is businesses, eventually, will do better if they focus on meeting customers' needs rather than on selling products. So, more specifically, those account managers are, formally, never called marketing staff. Instead, they are called sales managers.
 

Continuing with the organizational structure for marketing in XYZ and apart from the account managers who are viewed more of sales than of marketing staff; some other marketing responsibilities are informally undertaken by other functional units such as sales, services and finance. So, the marketing organizational structure of XYZ can match one of the marketing organization approaches argued by Moorman and Rust (1999, pp. 180-197) which is the cross-functional dispersion of marketing.
 

Additionally, there are two more perspectives that support the conclusion of the role of marketing of XYZ as a sales supporter; training and market expansion. There is no focus on marketing training, but sales training is the primary focus of the company. Although XYZ always seeks to increase market share, XYZ was originally founded to work in the GCC countries only except KSA and since then it has not expanded to provide its services to any other countries (XYZ, 2013b). It is more of a reactive approach toward the existing market and less of a proactive approach toward any new potential market.
 

All of the perspectives discussed above are perfectly matched with the results of the sales supporters cluster demonstrated by Hooley et al. (1990, pp. 7-24). Therefore, as a conclusion, the role of the marketing in XYZ has been undermined due to the nature of its main business as a distributer and its myopic objective of increasing sales revenue, in addition to undervaluing the prominence of customer stratification. It is worth noting that throughout the rest of this essay, the above mentioned account managers will be referred to as marketing staff.#p#分页标题#e#
 

市场营销和其他部门合作———Marketing and Other Functional Collaboration
 

Wind (1981, pp. 237-264) highlighted the significance of the nature of the cross-functional interfaces to the organization performance. XYZ Marketing staff is responsible for cooperating with the different departments in the company to handle customers’ proposals, offerings and delivery. Also, they are the focal point for any issues and problems. However, this cooperation is mainly during sales cycles and is not meant to convey customers’ insights to the other functional units. So, from the perspective of cross-functional interface between marketing staff and the other functional units, the marketing staff usually has poor interaction with other departments except the sales staff. This aligns well with the Sales Supporter cluster results of Hooley et al. (1990, pp. 7-24).
 

Although organizations usually confuse the roles of sales and marketing functional units (Meunier-FitzHugh and Piercy, 2007, pp. 939-955), this is not the case in XYZ as the two units have the same objective which is increasing the sales revenue. XYZ has different sales force for each technology domain such as hardware, network, software, and services. Each of these sales forces normally engage with the customers along with the marketing staff in sales cycles. So, in contrast to what Meunier-FitzHugh and Piercy (2007, pp. 939-955) emphasized that the sales and marketing should collaborate rather than integrate, the two units are integrated.
 

Although they did focus on the nature of the cross-functional interfaces, Lim and Reid (1992, pp. 159-165) proposed a useful assessment criteria that can be used to determine the type of cross-functional interfaces. The criteria maps the cross-functional interface based on two dimensions which are frequency of interaction (high, low) and quality of interaction (high, low). The criteria results four cross-functional interface types which are ideal, efficient, inefficient and unproductive. So, by applying their criteria on XYZ, one can find out that the type of cross-functional interface between the marketing staff and other functional units except the sales staff is inefficient. This can be attributed to the following reasons; One reason is that the frequency of interaction of the marketing staff with the other functional units in the company is high by virtue of their role, a second reason is that the quality of interaction of the marketing staff with the other functional units is low since such interaction is usually either to get information such as service effort estimates or to give directions in order to finalize a sales deal. They never guide the other functional unit towards customers’ needs and satisfaction.
 

In addition to the poor quality of interaction of the marketing staff with the other functional unit, some conflicts have been noticed between the marketing staff and the technical staff due to pushing certain products to customers which done without the consent of the technical staff. From the strategic planning perspective, the marketing staff in XYZ plays no or little role. Planning is based on the sales revenues the company wants to achieve and away from any research on customer needs and requirements. Strategic planning is done by senior management with considerable isolation of marketing and sales staff (XYZ, 2013b).#p#分页标题#e#
 

As a conclusion, the marketing staff in XYZ could have been better if were not evaluated on sales revenue and, were evaluated on customer satisfaction instead. As Levitt (1960, pp. 138-149) pointed out that selling focuses on the seller's need to convert the product into cash, while marketing adopts the idea of satisfying the customers’ needs. It is recommended that XYZ design a performance indicator to represent the customer satisfaction and hence evaluate the marketing staff based on that.
 

引言———Introduction
 

In the last decade, in a turbulent area like the Middle East, several events have been happening. In the following, two macro environmental trends are discussed with respect to their impact on XYZ business, how it was prepared for them, challenges and opportunities to which it was exposed and how it responded to their impacts. In addition to that, the rationale for selection of those trends is explained.
 

宏观经济环境的趋势———Economic Macro Environmental Trend
 

The first macro environmental trend is related to the economic environment. There is no doubt that 2008 financial crisis has impacted all the businesses in the world (Elliott, 2012). The crisis started in late 2007 in USA, then, it soon unfolded in the rest of the world. It came to the Middle East in the second half of 2008 when the oil prices started to fall (CFR, 2009). All governments and companies in the region started to put austerity measures to reduce their expenditures. Consequently, XYZ, like any other company, has been impacted by the financial crisis. The rationale for selecting such an economic element to study its impact on XYZ is twofold. Firstly, 2008 financial crisis is considered the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Reuters, 2009). So, studying an impact of such a great crisis on XYZ would give insights to the strengths and weaknesses of the company and how it utilized its capabilities to overcome the crisis and its consequences. Secondly, XYZ has relatively gone through the crisis successfully.
 

Now turning into how much the impact of the crisis was on XYZ and how it prepared and responded to it. During the annual kick-off meetings in February 2009 when the CEO and senior managers along with the employees gathered to discuss the results of 2008 and the way forward in 2009, the CEO has anticipated the impact of the financial crisis wave on the GCC in 2009. He explained the impact and put some strategic guidelines for 2009 to pass through the crisis. He pointed out to two major directions. The first one was that the company that can retain the cash would survive during the crisis. So, he emphasized the need to reduce the company cost to the minimum. The second one was to engage more with the company customers to set the sales priorities for them. As a result of these guidelines, the company was minimally impacted according to the annual report of 2009. The years 2010 and 2011 are considered the recovery period for the company as it recovered the sales revenue that had been lost in 2009 and started to grow from 2011 till now. Table 1 illustrates XYZ sales revenues and the growth percentage of each year compared to the previous year during the period 2007 till 2012. It is shown that during 2009, the company sales revenue declined by 8.07%. The company position in terms of the sales revenue in 2011 is recovered to that of 2008 (XYZ, 2013a).#p#分页标题#e#
 

Arguably, this result could have been better. There are, however, other possible explanations. After 3 years of the crisis, the growth has not even reached half of what it had been just before the crisis. The other explanation is that XYZ made a substantial up-selling in 2008 to its existing customers of products and services that were not of highest priority to them. This led to a negative impact on the company performance during and after the crisis due to the doubts some of the customers had towards the company which has affected the company sales revenue till now (XYZ, 2013b). As a conclusion, XYZ implemented a relatively successful strategy based on an awareness of the economic environment. However, the up-selling along with the cross-selling hindered the effectiveness of that strategy.
 

经济、技术和法律的宏观环境趋势———Economic, Technological and Legal Macro Environmental Trend
 

XYZ has legal contracts with its partners. This allows XYZ to be a sole distributer for some of its partners’ products. As an example, XYZ has a contract with IBM that includes a specific list of products. XYZ is the only company in the GCC countries that can exclusively sell those products. This contract is considered one of the best, if not the best, revenue generating elements of XYZ.
 

According to Boston Box categories (Baines et al., 2011, pp. 68), the portfolio of IBM products that are within XYZ contract can be considered a “Cash Cow”. Most of these products as well as their licenses renewals are being sold with little effort and having high market share. So, they generate good levels of profitability. However, these products have low market growth as they have been in the market for quite long time and the market became saturated.
 

IBM has realized the problem of having low market growth with its products and has addressed this problem by continuously updating its product portfolio rapidly in the last decade. Inherently, it respects the idea of Levitt (1960, pp. 138-149) which is low growth comes from the failure of the products to adapt to the consumers changing patterns of requirements, to new marketing practices and to competitors’ products developments. Generally, IBM’s solution to low market growth is done by two ways. The first one is through introducing new products superseding old ones. The second one is through acquisitions of successful products with good market share and high demand. Therefore, IBM gains market share and at the same time creates a market growth.
 

To XYZ, the solution that IBM follows negatively impacts its competitiveness power in the market. As IBM introduces these new products, XYZ is not able to sell them exclusively since they are not in its contract with IBM. XYZ as well as other partners in the GCC region can sell those newly introduced products. For instance, since early 2008 when IBM completed its acquisition of Cognos; a business intelligence company (IBM, 2008), XYZ had no exclusivity to sell it according to its contract with IBM. This led XYZ to lose one of the deals which required Cognos as one of its architectural components. The winner of the deal was one of XYZ new rivals that had a partnership with IBM. Similar instances have been recurring in recent years causing more losses to XYZ (XYZ, 2013b).#p#分页标题#e#
 

There is no doubt that XYZ could not have prevented IBM to introduce new products that are not included in its contract. Instead, XYZ could have better monitored the changes in the macro environment that has affected the company’s business (Baines et al., 2012). It would be inaccurate if the above described trend is ascribed to XYZ legal environment only. This is because the trend involves other economic and technological environments as well.
 

From the economic environment view point, a major input to the business of XYZ has been negatively impacted, namely; the exclusivity on IBM products. This resulted in the rise of new rivals in the market. From the technological environment view point, the new technologically products, that are introduced by IBM either originally or through acquisitions, compete with the old products of IBM. It is not uncommon to find more than one IBM product that does almost the same functionality as another one, and thus some IBM products are already in competition. Additionally, this trend cannot be argued as a supplier, represented by IBM, trying to exert bargaining pressure on XYZ. One can argue that XYZ could have negotiated its contract with IBM for having the exclusivity on the new products. The counter argument to that is any macro environment elements including the legal cannot be controlled by a company (Baines et al., 2012).

As a conclusion, XYZ did not prepare for the changes in the economic, technological and legal environments surrounding one of its major inputs to business; the IBM contract. This has threatened its business and will continue if no corrective actions are taken by XYZ.
 

Baines et al. (2011, pp. 60) define environmental scanning as a three stages process of gathering data about an organization’s external events, trends and relationship, interpreting and analyzing the gathered environmental data and finally formulating strategy to help management in decision making. In addition to the environmental scanning role of enabling the organization management in future strategic planning, Albright (2004, pp. 38) highlighted its significance of evaluating the organization’s strengths and weaknesses in response to external threats and opportunities. Although, the organization is not able to control the external environment, as indicated by Baines et al. (2011), Brownlie (1994, pp. 703-723) emphasized the proactive role of the organization towards the external environment rather than the reactive role.
 

While the above mentioned definition of environmental scanning, which concentrates on the external environment, being adopted by many organizations, small ones consider different areas of environmental scanning which are not necessary external. Baines et al. (2011, pp. 59) argued that small manufacturing companies consider customer and competitor information, company resources and capabilities, and suppliers of labor and funds.
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In XYZ, there is no formal process or even a definition of environmental scanning. The responsibility of environmental scanning is, similar to marketing, cross-functional and not centralized in a particular functional unit. Informally, XYZ environmental scanning is performed on some of the Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Legal and Ecological (PESTLE) environments, suggested by Baines et al. (2011), as well as customers’ information.
 

Scanning of Political and Economic environments is mainly performed by the top management. This can be noticed from the company annual report that highlights the impact of the political and economic events on the business. Scanning of the Technological environment is done in two ways; through XYZ partners who provide the technological information about the new trends and products and on an ad hoc basis by the technical staff. Legal environment is monitored by the legal department which is more concerned with the contractual obligations of XYZ towards both customers and partners (XYZ, 2013b). The other environments of the PESTLE are not scanned.
 

Customers and competitors information scanning is conducted in a form of ad hoc practices that are undertaken voluntarily by some sales staff and marketing staff who need to keep track of the customers’ purchases from XYZ as well as its competitors. In gathering the information, they depend on the verbal communication and personal relationship with the customers, and hence, there is no formal method for information gathering (XYZ, 2013b). Therefore, as a conclusion, XYZ does not have a well-defined environmental scanning process.
 

As a way forward to XYZ, a formal and well- defined environmental scanning process has to be designed to serve as a warning system (Albright, 2004, pp. 38) to identify potential threats and opportunities. Despite the informality of the cross-functional approach of XYZ in conducting the environmental scanning, proper integration and linkage between the different functional units could lead to a successful and efficient business strategy (Lim and Reid, 1992, pp. 159–165) including environmental scanning strategy. One suggestion is to assign certain responsibilities to each of the functional units of the company, such as assigning the technological environment to the technical staff. The second suggestion is to structure and empower a marketing functional unit in a way that allows it to specify what information should be gathered by each functional unit (Evans, 1988, pp. 21-29). This functional unit would then compile and analyze the gathered information and direct the decision making through participating strategy planning. One final suggestion is to use an information system that would keep all the gathered external environments information, generate reports; this will help in projecting historical and current information into future trends.