Customer Involvement in Recipe to Riches Case Study

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Customer Involvement in Recipe to Riches Case Study

Introduction

Hello fellow students, today I am going to talk about customer involvement in the Recipe to Riches case study. Involving customers in the decisions of a company could be beneficial to improving the brand name of a product or service.

First, what is customer involvement?

Customer involvement is a method used to influence the behaviour of consumers by allowing consumers to search for information, make decisions and suggestions that help in the development of a product or service (Zaichkowsky, 2010). It is applied in marketing to influence the purchasing behaviours of consumers and convince them to purchase through incorporating their interests, preferences and choices. It also influences communication behaviours through the perception of risks, brand loyalty, opinion leadership, and segmentation (Michaelidou & Dibb, 2008). Consumers get the chance to communicate with the producers of products and services to provide information on improvement and also factors to change to improve customer satisfaction.

Now let us look at the importance of customer involvement based on the case study. The contestants at a point decided to involve consumers through social media. So first, the sales campaign involved the integration of products with social media pages to encourage fans to purchase the items. The Facebook platform provides an avenue for the consumers to communicate their suggestions and preferences to the producer. Therefore, customer involvement is essential in the co-creation of products and services using the ideas received from target consumers (Bharti & Agrawal, 2018).

Secondly, it provides efficient use of the consumers as resources for skills and expertise from the target market. Through these procedures, consumer satisfaction is improved. For example, as Stephen Hollow and Chris used social media platforms to get more ideas, they increased the interactions between fans and the show hence making it better.

Thirdly, it increases the sales made, enabling the adoption of the new products. As the contestants involve fans through social media platforms, they get insights on improving their recipes for products hence convincing the consumers to purchase. It encourages them to adopt the new product as it strengthens the relationship between the consumers and the marketer or producer.

From this importance we learn that consumer involvement empowers customers to respond to failures in products or services in a way that communicates the failures to the producers to enable improvement (Kimita et al., 2016).

Next, I am going to look at effect of customer involvement using social media, on the interest of people purchasing the product.

First, the provision of a social media platform, or allowing consumers to send SMS, communicating their worries and challenges will increase the consumers’ interest in the products (Hashim & Fadhil, 2017).

Also, supporting the winning product through SMS and social media would increase the interest of other target markets. This is because social media platform is open to a vast target population; hence as fans vote for a winning product, others will be motivated to try the product or participate in the voting process. This method increases the interest of fans in the product hence leading to higher sales.

Secondly, as consumer’s interest increase when viewers vote for the winning product, the product achieves a brand known by a massive target population. Other than the product brand, the attention on the television show increases, hence the consumer base rises. The contestants’ products achieve a high target customer even before the product gets to the market. Therefore, the high involvement of viewers voting increases the customers for the television program. Consequently, the contestants’ target population is easily reached through the TV program. As the products get to the market, the consumers are knowledgeable and develop a high interest in purchasing the product.

Therefore, Customer involvement is essential in increasing satisfaction as well as encouraging consumers to purchase.

Thank you for your attention!

References

Bharti, K., & Agrawal, R. (2018). High customer involvement: an essential element for effective co-creation. International Journal Of Business Innovation And Research, 15(4), 431. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijbir.2018.090460Hashim, K., & Fadhil, N. (2017). Engaging with Customer Using Social Media Platform: A Case Study of Malaysia Hotels. Procedia Computer Science, 124, 4-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2017.12.123Kimita, K., Sugino, R., Rossi, M., & Shimomura, Y. (2016). Framework for Analyzing Customer Involvement in Product-service Systems. Procedia CIRP, 47, 54-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2016.03.232Michaelidou, N., & Dibb, S. (2008). Consumer involvement: a new perspective. The Marketing Review, 8(1), 83-99. https://doi.org/10.1362/146934708x290403Zaichkowsky, J. (2010). Consumer Involvement. Wiley International Encyclopedia Of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444316568.wiem03014