Total Quality Marketing: The Key to Regaining Market Shares

Having achieved production quality, aggressive foreign firms are cleverly shifting emphasis to Total Quality Marketing, which is a dynamic market-driven concept that goes beyond the currently popular Total Quality Management approach. It centres on customer satisfaction as a way of achieving solutions to business problems. It is a market-driven idea that stresses customer satisfaction as crucial to the success of a business in a highly competitive modern business world. The concept is an enhanced version of the marketing mix - the familiar 4-P paradigm in marketing. Thus, by incorporating quality into their product, price promotion and distribution strategy, firms can regain market shares; and can prevent further erosion of market shares to aggressive foreign competitors from Japan, Germany and the Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs). By not focusing on markets, firms risk losing their businesses to aggressive foreign firms. The work is aimed at business executives, scholars, researchers, policy makers of business and government, foreign firms and the general public. It has eight chapters. The first chapter presents the problem of loss of market shares. Chapter two evaluates imports to identify major competitors and what they export to the US. Chapter three focuses on the SWOT analysis, which evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of US versus foreign firms. Chapter four unravels the market share mystique. The following chapters introduce Total Quality Marketing, explain how Total Quality Marketing is currently carried out in some firms and show the integration of quality into marketing through company examples. The last chapter provides a concluding commentary by looking into the future.