Marketing has changed throughout the industry and keeping up with the changing economy is a must. The world was changing at an alarming rate and new technologies seem to be an everyday occurrence. In the heat of the change, marketing needed every advantage to keep the loyalty of the existing customers. They basically wanted repeat transactions so advertising and sales promotions are key activities and each company with a brand on the market wanted to win the customers’ preference and to have that “repeat purchase”. The building of a relationship between the manufacture and the customer was established. And one of marketing’s roles is to guide product differentiation and to create preference and loyalty that will earn higher prices and profits.
Customers find it easier and more of a convenience to shop in the same store and buy the brand they were attracted to. In addition, the industrial market was finding out how important the long-term relationship between buyer-seller was and is. In these long term buyer-seller relationships, prices are an outcome of a negotiation process based on mutual dependence. The world was changing so fast that the standard ways of doing business was outdated. Competition among vendors, through systems of competitive bidding around extreme tight product specifications, was the method by which vendor greed and opportunism were controlled.
All of this marketing mayhem attracted global competitors and they brought a new concept and that was “quality does not just sell better, it also cost less. American marketers began to see the necessity of moving away from that one time sell a ...