MANAGING CUSTOMER PERCEPTION: A PRE-REQUISITE FOR MODERN MARKETING

Changes and challenges are inevitable features of market. On one hand it manages pressure of growth profitability and ever increasing competition and on other hand pressure of maintaining ethical values, customer relationship and customer satisfaction have also become inevitable for sustainable success. Balancing of both these factors have become the need of the moment for any business involved in marketing in the light of current market condition. With boom in information technology, the customer has become more demanding towards their recognition and needs. Ever growing expectations of customers and intense competition in market have grown to more precise levels and pushed the marketers in defensive mode where they can’t afford to lose a single customer. This has further lead the business to that plate- form where every business activity is focused to customer satisfaction and retention. The customer satisfaction is quite complex term where a number of factors contribute against certain formed expectations at some specific point of time. These expectations in turn lead to as “value” to the customers in their minds expected from that product or service. Creation of such value for the customer is the ultimate objective of any business but it is a relative term which depends upon the perceptual aspects of individual customer. As every customer is different in various references and his behavior towards buying depends upon various complex factors which are quite different and unpredictable, so , their expectations and perceptions also differ. We cannot manage the ever changing behavior of customer towards buying correctly in our favour in the light of his better informed status and complexity of behavioral influences, but we can definitely manage his perceptions in better ways to enable him to form his expectations accordingly in favor of our product and in turn the value for his money and time.