Benchmarking [business marketing performance]

All organisations are continuously striving to improve their business results. However, despite great efforts to improve efficiency and reduce costs, many companies still find they are not performing as well as others. Companies can have excellent technical skills, leading edge designs and inventiveness, but do not capitalise on their assets. In most cases the problem is that they are not sufficiently focused on the needs of their customers. There are very few companies in which everyone in the organisation recognises that customer service excellence is the key objective of the business. Many managers recognise that their organisations need to improve their customer service but do not know the most cost effective actions to take. To improve anything, the first requirement is to be able to measure it and then it is possible to determine the effectiveness of any changes. This paper describes how, in order to determine the right changes to make, effective marketing is required, ensuring that the organisation understands its customers and their needs, knows about its competitors and the environment in which it is operating. It describes how to benchmark an organisation´s overall marketing performance requires a detailed examination of a wide range of its activities and the ability to measure these against a world-class standard