Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 The Research Background and Motivation
David Packard of Hewlett-Packard said: "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." Professor Stephen Burnett of Northwestern adds: "In a truly great marketing organization, you cannot tell who's in the marketing department. Everyone in the organization has to make decisions based on the impact on the consumer." Marketing is the business function that identifies customer needs and wants, determines which target markets the organization can best serve, designs appropriate products, services, and programs to serve these markets, and calls upon everyone in the organization to "think and serve customers."
Advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and store retailers are traditional means of communication between sellers and buyers. However, these methods have faced a lot of pressure in the past several years. Today, the style of the consumer market is different, because of the increase in the number working women, the difficulty in getting to stores, and so forth. For these reasons traditional marketing cannot fit into today's market environment very well. Further, the cost of traditional marketing is growing. That means marketing organizations have to find and use a new marketing method -- "Telemarketing."
Telemarketing has many benefits to companies and consumers. Consumers appreciate the speed and convenience of placing orders, reserving tickets, and contributing donations through 800 numbers. They also have grown used to settling problems and making complaints by telephone, effectively putting and end to the complaint letter. Companies like Telemarketing because it is fast, efficient, and less expensive than other marketing approaches, including person-to-person sales calls and conversations. It also provides immediate results, saves time, helps make field salespeople more efficient, increases the profits of each sale, conserves energy, and helps reduce pollution. Telemarketing has many advantages. It is becoming a popular and important marketing method in USA presently. Accordingly, to do the research on Telemarketing is very attractive and useful.
1.2 The Research Objective
This research project discusses a lot of things about Telemarketing. It includes Telemarketing theory, the influence factors of Telemarketing, the strategies of Telemarketing, and a review of related literature. The purpose is let everybody better understand this kind of marketing method, especially the "what", "why", "when" and "how to" of Telemarketing. In addition, field interviews by telephone were conducted to determine some of the responses, opinions, reasons, and acceptance of Telemarketing by consumers. I hope everybody can get a lot of help and ideas from this research project.
1.3 The Research Method and Process
This project includes three main parts (Please see Figure 1.1) as follows:
- The Literature Research
First of all, to identify the scope and content of research, the Telemarketing literature was reviewed. The literature resources came from reference books, magazines, newspapers.
- Field Interviews by Telephone
Using a random sample of 150, 60 effective responses were obtained from "Ameritech PagesPlus: Near North Suburban White and Yellow Pages," Then an analysis of the data was undertaken in order to understand the responses and opinions of residents on Telemarketing.
- Review of Related Literature
Telemarketing belongs to Direct Marketing, Direct Marketing belongs to Non-Store Retailers. A full understanding of Telemarketing requires some knowledge of the more general subject of direct marketing. Some of the aspects of direct marketing are discussed.
Figure 1.1 The Research Process
Last update: May 16, 1995; Version 1.0.2
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