Stem Task Report: Added Value/Value Selling

Résumé du document

Visiting the showroom of a large printer and copier manufacturer, an attentive observer realizes that, although every copier has the same name tag on it, the design and the material used differ between products. This could be considered odd, as the products have the same colors and the company's brand name on it. However, this phenomenon called OEM has solidly penetrated into the market in the past years. The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), is a manufacturer who buys finished products from another company and either modifies its components or leaves the product as it came. Then, these products are branded and brought to the market with the OEM's name, warranty and service. The term manufacturer is misleading to some extent, as the OEM is more of a customizer than a manufacturer. Considering that finished equipment is bought from suppliers, not changed but resold, the questions arises that how an OEM adds more value to products while offering these to customers, what is their sales approach and what are the reasons for buying finished products?

Extraits

[...] A specific industry was chosen to provide the ability of making valuable comparisons. The quantitative interview consisted of a questionnaire from the STEM in order to perform the Marketing Excellence Scan. This was used in order to evaluate marketing efforts and the strategy of a company and build a basis for comparison. The qualitative interview consisted of questions derived by the interviewers from the literature with the intention to analyze whether and how value selling is implemented and if the concept of TCO is used to sell offerings Marketing Excellence Scan In order to meet the first goal a survey is conducted in order to analyze a lot of dimensions effectively. [...]

[...] (marketresearch.com, 2007) Based on the company websites, company overviews of Xerox (Xerox, 2007), Océ (Océ, 2007) and Lexmark (Lexmark, 2007) will be presented next Xerox General Xerox is a $ 15.7 billion technology and service enterprises and a leader in the global document market. The company has a very broad product range as it specializes in printers and copiers from the smallest office printer to the largest colour printing production system. The company operates in over 160 countries worldwide and employs a staff of 55,200 direct employees. In addition agents work for Xerox and the company cooperates with 10,000 resellers. [...]

[...] As the company sells through direct channels only and focuses on relationship building and gathering market information, the results are evident. Furthermore, the company works in collaboration with customers to develop new applications. Even though one would expect encouragement of customer feedback in a market and customer driven organization, the company does not incorporate feedback in their processes, thus missing out part of the market information possible to aquire. Lexmark performs comparable to the benchmark on almost every dimension (App. 6). [...]

[...] Lexmark takes the follow up position and benchmarks its prices to the ones HP sets. However, intensifying competition in the market through entrants from Asia could put pressure on the company's revenues and margins. (Lexmark, 2007) Chapter 5 results In the following, the results of the Marketing Excellence Scan and the interviews will be discussed. First, the results for each company will be analysed and reasons for deviations with respect to best in class will be given based on interpretations from the personal interviews conducted. [...]

[...] Lexmark however claims to be very flexible. They follow the trends in the market very precisely and add value to the customer based on that, in the sense that they come up with solutions for them. An example of such a trend is that the dutch government had decided that hospitals are supposed to keep digital and up to date patient files by January 2008. Lexmark developed a scanner which scans hardcopy forms and transforms it into workable digital files. [...]