The Credibility of the Source: How to Check the Reliability of Your Sources

Cespedes, Dougherty, and Skinner draw their research from extensively published business journals besides their experience. Cespedes is a senior lecturer in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Dougherty is the founder of a health care IT firm in Boston, and Skinner is the head of a sales firm in Atlanta. The authors have a wealth of experience from both their positions as professors in leading institutions and as business leaders of highly successful organizations. 

Today, marketers are not only concerned about the purchase but also the strength of the relationship that the brand has with its consumers. The stronger the affiliation between a brand and its customers, the better is the brand placed to weather market disruptions in addition to introducing new disruptions of its own (Kotler & Keller, 2015). By characterizing its products and services, an organization emphasizes the growing lifetime value of their customer relationships. This can be achieved through broadening their offerings in order to fill the needs of the customer and the cross-selling of associated goods and services, which add to the total customer equity. Product or service characterization provides the necessary information that an organization needs to adequately identify and characterize their target markets including who the players in the market are and how they influence each other, value-added opportunities, barriers and leverage points as well as other potential metrics that could strengthen the brand's relationship with its customers. 

The combination of two brands complements the co-brand with a positive identity. This strategy enhances the perception of customers on brand equity irrespective of whether the second-branding partner was either a high or low equity trademark (Kotler & Keller, 2015). The high-equity brand isolates the low-equity trademark from less favorable associations by consumers. Co-branding techniques and practices result in the high equity product offering a competitive edge to a product that is being introduced by a less known trademark or to an already existing product that wants to re-establish itself (Kotler & Keller, 2015). Co-branding affects the product and brand relationship negatively if the consumers associate the bad attributes and experiences of the low-equity trademark with the high-equity trademark, thus damaging the total brand equity and the brand relationship of the organizations. It also becomes cumbersome when the co-branding strategy of the two brands are entirely different or popular in different markets – the co-branding efforts and strategy will be a failure. 

b. How an organization can develop consumer experiences that enhance the abstract and often complex characteristics of services. 

Cespedes, Dougherty, and Skinner draw their research from extensively published business journals besides their experience. Cespedes is a senior lecturer in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Dougherty is the founder of a health care IT firm in Boston, and Skinner is the head of a sales firm in Atlanta. The authors have a wealth of experience from both their positions as professors in leading institutions and as business leaders of highly successful organizations. 

The biggest challenge facing the service industry is design. Service companies cannot last in the market if their offerings are flawed. To be able to develop consumer experiences that last, service managers must design their offerings in ways that they effectively satisfy the needs of consumers (Kotler & Keller, 2015). While product managers focus on the attributes that buyers will value, service designers, must emphasize the experiences that consumers want to have. To develop successful service offerings, services managers should establish the characteristics that they want to target in the market for excellence and those for inferior performance based on the needs of the consumers. An organization must discern the attributes that are of importance to the consumer then match its investment in providing service excellence based on those priorities (Kotler & Keller, 2015). Once a customer segment has been found, the organization should optimize the specific attributes of its offering to meet consumer needs and priorities and does not dwell in investing in underappreciated offerings. 

Today, creating a compelling customer experience is more than ensuring that they receive their products and services on time (Kotler & Keller, 2015). Compelling customer experiences are created when organizations build touchpoints with real people who can categorically grow the brand through mass media and offline interactions with consumers. Companies strive to build a culture of quality in their workforces because service businesses are people-intensive, and employee management is the key to achieving success (Kotler & Keller, 2015). The top management needs to implement robust talent recruitment and management systems that reflect on the service offerings that the organization is advocating for. The organization should strive to create a culture in which employees embody quality as a personal attribute rather than obeying instructions from the management (Kotler & Keller, 2015). In the service business, the management of its people and the soundness of its offering is an indispensable business need that should be followed when developing consumer experiences. 

c. Describe how consumer psychology is influenced by discrepancies in reference prices, price-quality inferences, and unexpected price-endings. Assess the impact of disconfirmations on brand equity to include a statement regarding the risks to the financial success of the organization’s products and services. 

The Credibility of the source 

Cespedes, Dougherty, and Skinner draw their research from extensively published business journals besides their experience. Cespedes is a senior lecturer in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Dougherty is the founder of a health care IT firm in Boston, and Skinner is the head of a sales firm in Atlanta. The authors have a wealth of experience from both their positions as professors in leading institutions and as business leaders of highly successful organizations. 

Over the years, psychological pricing mechanisms have been deployed by marketers in order to influence the buying behavior of consumers. The prevailing wisdom on consumer psychology suggests that if a particular pricing strategy generates more revenue and results in higher sales, then it should continuously be used by the organization (Kotler & Keller, 2015). The discrepancies in pricing strategies have enabled marketing managers to determine pricing points that invoke relatively high levels of demand on the increment in sales. Often than not, consumers prefer round prices rather than odd ones when they have problems in forming a reference price. It should also be taken into consideration that consumers perceive odd pricing as a discounted pricing than when round prices are used (Kotler & Keller, 2015). To drive sales and revenue, organizations must ensure that their pricing strategies are focused on the self-image and ego of consumers. If the pricing strategy of the product or service touches on the self-image of the consumer, this indicates the viability of the strategy before its implemented in the market. 

The perceived value is the customer's extensive evaluation of a product based on the interpretation of what is given and received. A lot of value has been placed on what customers get for what they give. For many organizations, brand equity is an invaluable and yet fragile asset (Kotler & Keller, 2015). Brand equity is fragile because it has been built on consumers' beliefs, and this can be affected when there are shifts in consumer preferences that are outside the control of the management. Firms with a strong brand equity attract better customers and hence will experience sustained earnings and future growth (Kotler & Keller, 2015). The change in external expectations and beliefs to brand equity results in reputational risks for the quality of its products and services, thus resulting in poor financial performance. 

2. After reading the companion article (

Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality

The credibility of the source 

Garvin, a prolific researcher, writer, and a Harvard Business School professor. Garvin has made many contributions in the field of organizational behavior and was awarded the 1998 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for an article he wrote for the MIT Sloan Review titled “The Processes of Organization and Management.” 

Today, businesses are operating in uncertain environments, and the dynamics are more complex. The ongoing challenge that is facing organizations is on how to achieve and maintain the quality of their products or services in order to satisfy and attract more customers (Garvin, 1987). Product quality is a postponing tool that is used by organizations to promote their products. To remain competitive, organizations must continuously improve the quality of their products and services. Over the last five years, the level of competition has increased both in the United States and the global business environment, and organizations have renewed their focus on the quality of their products and services in order to maintain their demand (Garvin, 1987). Quality can be defined as the total attributes contained in a product or service that bear its ability to fulfill the implied or stated needed. According to Garvin (1987), customer satisfaction the central driver to competitiveness, growth, and survival of any organization, which does not only increase the value of the business but also lower the costs associated with attracting new customers. 

The eight dimensions proposed by Garvin (1987), implore managers to adopt the strategic quality management approach in understanding how consumers perceive things. 

Given the eight dimensions proposed by Garvin, some of them are mutually reinforcing, while some of them are not. A product or service can be categorized as high in two or three dimensions of quality but low in others. The dimensions that are not mutually reinforcing means the improvement in one dimension can be accomplished at the cost of another. Therefore, managers must be able to select the dimensions in which they want their product or service to compete. 

3. After reading the companion article (

Viewing Brands in Multiple Dimensions

The credibility of the source 

Holbrook, Berthon, and Hulbert are acclaimed professors in the field of marketing, management information systems, brands, and marketing strategy in their respective universities. The authors have more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in their resumes. The authors have also won awards for teaching excellence. 

The way consumers respond to the branding strategies of an organization is critical to the organization's ability to leverage the equity in their brands across different markets. Brands represent the everyday life of consumers. Therefore, organizations need to understand how consumers respond to brands – what they think, feel, and how they act towards them (Berthon et al., 2007). Consumer research insights play an important role in the managerial decisions made in marketing, such as the development of pricing, advertising, and channel strategies. Not all consumers hold the same importance to a brand, and understanding the connection between consumers and brands is of theoretical and managerial importance. In today's competitive markets, organizations are going at greater lengths to form strong bonds with consumers as well as build mutually beneficial relationships (Berthon et al., 2007). Therefore, effective branding is vital in creating an added value to a product or service that enables the organization to differentiate their products in the market and to satisfy the needs of the consumers. 

Today's consumers are aware and knowledgeable, and this has made it difficult for managers to understand the purchasing behaviors of consumers. Brand equity assesses the consumers' perception of the brand in order to promote marketing approaches that are in line with the consumers' needs (Berthon et al., 2007). The brand manifold enables organizations to create new or existing brand extensions that benefit from parent brand perceptions. With an understanding of how consumers process information, multidimensional brands can shape their reactions using communication in which the internal and external brand meanings evoke the customers' mode of cognition (Berthon et al., 2007). Communications about brand equity should be designed based on the tendencies that are consistent with the attitudes towards multiple brand dimensions. 

References 

Berthon, P., Holbrook, M., Pitt, L., & Hulbert, J. (2007). Viewing Brands in Multiple Dimensions . MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved 24 July 2020, from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/viewing-brands-in-multiple-dimensions 

Garvin, D. (1987). Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality . Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 24 July 2020, from https://hbr.org/1987/11/competing-on-the-eight-dimensions-of-quality. 

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. (2015). A Framework for Marketing Management (6th ed.). Pearson.