Marketing is one of the basic functions of management, as it is simply concerned with identifying human needs and desires and working to meet them through a group of sub-processes that interact together in the so-called marketing mix. It has subjected the marketing mix to too many changes according to some theories that arose through observation, recording, and follow-up of the behavior of customers and their needs.

The marketing function aims to:

• Recognize the needs and desires of consumers.
• Transform these needs and desires for goods and services
• Working to market them to the largest number of consumers, which results in consumers buying those goods or getting these services to satisfy their various desires and needs.

Production and marketing are the essences of the economic system in any society. This is because the economic system aims to satisfy the needs of society with all the goods and services that consumers need. The role of marketing in this context is to focus on identifying those needs that are compatible with consumers’ desires for goods and services and in a way that satisfies those needs and desires; Thus, marketing is the activity of pricing, promoting, and distributing goods and services that seek to satisfy the desires of individuals and organizations. For this, the marketing mix in place for a long time, which grew from 4Ps to 6Ps, then 8Ps and finally 8Cs, has now become 4Rs because of the emergence and spread of e-marketing channels and online trade, which have developed dramatically in the midst of the Corona pandemic.

What is the 4Rs marketing mix?

It is an innovative marketing mix as an alternative to the traditional 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) where the need for a modern marketing mix has emerged that fits the technical development in marketing, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence, as well as changing customer behavior.

Recognition:

The product must be easily distinguishable and have an independent character among other alternatives in the market.

Relevance:

It is the return on the customer’s investment in the product he/she purchased and the reliability of the product in achieving the customer’s goal for which he/she bought the product.

Reward:

The added value provided by the product compared to other alternatives offered by competitors, for example, the safety specifications in (VOLVO) are higher than those of other cars.

Relationship:

The customer’s relationship with the product in the long term is important, as the customers’ engagement with the product leads them to return to buy again. Also advertises the company by speaking positively about it with relatives, friends and co-workers, as well as supporting the company on social media platforms. Therefore, it is crucial to achieve customers’ satisfaction, which is the core of a long-term relationship.

Putting the 4Rs into practice:

The following example puts the 4Rs as a modern marketing mix into a practical framework of a mobile application:

The key for effective 4Rs strategy:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the modern trends in management, which began in the seventies of the 20th century with the increase of the use of computers in business organizations. Many studies have proven that the use of this strategy has many benefits, whether in increasing profits, customer satisfaction, or the organization’s ability to predict the future trends and needs of customers, providing a competitive advantage and a reliable element of strength to ensure the organization’s survival and continuity in a highly competitive business environment.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are priorities of successful organizations. The loyal customer is the one who buys the organization’s products periodically and speaks positively about it, which increases the chances of attracting new customers and resists the attempts of competing organizations to lure and attract him/her away. This made the relationship with customers a critical matter recently. Nowadays organizations collect and analyze information about that relationship to manage it effectively because of its vital importance to the survival and continuity of the organization.

What is customer relationship management?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process that enables organizations to manage their interactions with customers, usually using data analysis to examine and analyze large amounts of data.

Why is customer relationship management important?

CRM helps organizations build a relationship with their customers, which creates loyalty. Since customer loyalty and satisfaction are both factors that affect sales, CRM is a strategy that leads to increased profits and maintains a competitive advantage. At its core, a CRM tool creates a simple user interface for a collection of data that helps organizations communicate with customers and address their needs.

Centralized database:

CRM helps collect data from customers during purchases, after-sales services, or even complaints, which provides information that all departments in the organization can benefit from. Therefore, organizations that implement CRM systems benefit from this by creating a unified database to ensure that it synchronizes the inputs for all departments which helps to decide effectively.

Automated data entry:

CRM systems depend on the automation of the process of data entry, classification and sorting since the seventies of the last century, which has witnessed significant development over time, reaching its peak in the current era with the advancement of communication and information technologies. Which helps to collect and analyze information with almost zero error rates.

Tracks all sales interactions:

CRM allows the organization to record all the operations that take place with customers, whether purchases, returns, maintenance, after-sales services, or complaints, which gives the organization a detailed reference about its relationship with customers and its relationship with each customer specifically, as well as measuring their satisfaction with some products. All of this data is of great importance in the decision-making process.

Reminds time of follow up:

Automation of data recording and review systems, and relying on technological means, allows the organization to follow up on its operations, especially those related to the customer, such as delivery dates, installation, or maintenance. The importance of these systems increases in organizations that deal with many customers and receive thousands or millions of requests per second, which enhances the organization’s ability to control and follow-up, as well as reduce the margin of errors to the least possible.

Facilitate team/customer communication:

Accurate recording, analysis, and sorting of data in a way that serves the organization’s requirements to get to know its customers are one of the important factors to improve the quality of communication between members of the work team because of the clarity and sufficiency of the data, which facilitates clarity of vision and unification of the work team’s efforts towards improving performance, solving problems or innovation, as well as ease of communication with the customers and understanding their requirements and problems and deal with them efficiently and effectively.

Enables forecasting:

This process is characterized by the future prediction of customer trends according to the analyzed data previously collected from customers, whether during purchases or continuous follow-up with them, therefore the more data is sufficient, the more accurate the forecasting becomes along with the organization’s ability to identify and categorize leads and manage them.

Continually grows:

One advantage of organizations adopting a CRM strategy is the database that increases with the expansion in dealing with customers or attracting new customers, and it is one factor of the organizations’ strengths and competitive advantage in the current era under highly competitive business conditions.

Conclusion:

Consumers’ needs develop over time under the economic and social development that has changed dramatically in the last two decades and the spread of electronic commerce and electronic marketing, which called on business organizations to develop their marketing strategies and shift from the traditional to modern methods to cope with the environmental changes that affect consumer’s behavior and trends,  Which led for the emergence of a new marketing mix based on an effective customer relationship that would create for the organization a reference to achieve an advantage in the highly competitive market.