The Impact of Customer Orientation on the Business Strategies
the Customisation Case of Nestlé on French and Chinese Dairy Markets
Social sciencesCustomer orientationCustomisationCorporate marketing strategyNestléFrench/Chinese Dairy marketSAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP
Background: As Porter?s diamond (1990) suggested, the business environment highly influences firms? strategies. Today, most of the companies have to decide their strategy depending from a worldwide business environment. Yet, strategy researches and the growing importance of marketing for business success also show that customer dimension must be taken into consideration. On some markets and in certain industries, the offer is much higher than the demand and then, companies need to attract customers. On the national level, companies multiply customer surveys in order to reach their expectations. On the global level, this is more complicated. Adaptation seeks to customise product offerings to be more tailored to a particular culture?s needs and tastes, and thus, can gather a greater market share than would be allowed by offering only a standardised product. In this thesis, we decide to look deeper at industry circumstances, corporation?s customisation strategies and competitive advantages of customisation in order to know whether companies can use customisation to be more profitable. We also want to investigate how the development situation of the industry and the function of customer orientation influence the company?s strategies; and how companies use their customer adaptation strategies to adapt their products and marketing to local markets. Purpose: The purpose of our work is to develop companies? awareness on the effects of customisation and of adapting their products to customer behaviours by developing customers? point of view and by comparing it to companies? strategies. Results: According to the research results, Nestlé has adopted the customised strategies to adapt to French and Chinese dairy markets. Based on the Sheth?s model, we refined a new model by completing Sheth?s one with two dimensions - customer focus dimension and market type dimension. We characterised the customer orientation strategy and the standardisationstrategy, which are the two principal choices the companies need to do regarding the product design. Moreover, to add a new element in those well-known strategies, we introduced a nuance into the corporate strategies depending on the aiming market situation.