Marketing Challenges of Satisfying Consumers Changing Expectations and Preferences in a Competitive Market

Abstract

In a prevalent business environment which is highly competitive, firms pay more attention to the needs of customers and offer them quality products to satisfy their ever-rising expectations. Marketers often face challenges from a rapidly changing market condition. Satisfying customers' ever-rising and changing expectations, discovering customers' current needs is a complex process. It involves translating the voice of the customer (VOC) into product features; translating the voice of the business (VOB) into generating profits, through new and improved products; translating the voice of the engineers (VOE) which deals with technical requirement and constraints into physical products. In fact, customer satisfaction and total quality management requires a company ability to accurately determine customer requirements and successfully transform these requirements into finished quality products. Customer satisfaction is considered to affect customer retention and therefore, profitability and competitiveness. This study examines the variables that pose as marketing challenges of satisfying consumers changing expectation and preferences in a competitive market, such as market turbulence, technology turbulence, general economy, competition, management training and intelligence response. The descriptive statistics and multiple regression were used to ascertain how these variables influence customers changing expectations and preferences.