Marketing Project: Smartphone Repair Shop Customer Stories Analysis

This project outlines a marketing strategy for a smartphone repair shop, centered around the concept of 'Stories by Customers'. The core idea involves leveraging customer repair success stories through a blog to attract new business. The project details the target market, which includes all smartphone users, with a focus on demographic and geographic specifics. It proposes a positioning strategy based on price differentiation, including referral pricing and group repair discounts, offering a competitive advantage through service introduction via brochures, participation in industry events, and tailored service packages. The distribution strategy emphasizes content marketing, using blogs to review durable equipment and highlight the shop's ability to service various devices. The pricing strategy suggests competitive rates, advance payments from corporate clients, seasonal discounts, and bidding strategies for government contracts. The promotion strategy focuses on using blogs for publicity, launching holiday schemes, and utilizing map markers for easy customer location. The project draws upon various academic references to support its marketing recommendations, including works on service marketing, customer relationships, and digital marketing.

SMART PHONE REPAIRING SHOP
“STORIES BY CUSTOMERS”
Student Name:

Description of the new service
• Name of Service: Customer Repair Stories
• Industry: Mobile Phone Repair
• Idea: Using blog, one can bring up customer repair success
stories and company can publish success stories to get more
business (Rust & Huang, 2014).
• Pre and Post service of smartphones photos as well as
customer’s experience can be great for referrals (Leeflang,
Verhoef, Dahlström & Freundt, 2014).
• If a customer says it’s ok then they are more likely to
provide reference via the blog and also post it on his or her
personal social media accounts for word of mouth publicity.

Target Market
• The target market would include all the
smartphone buyers. To be specific:
• The people who have smart phone or
tablets
o Demographic: Both male and female
o Geographic: Australia
o Income: Mid Income
o The small businesses, who give smart
phones to their employees

Positioning Strategy and Competitive Advantage
Positioning Strategy-:
Price Differentiation - Be competitive on price, but it has to be
presented in a unique way. Here we use referral pricing where
customer can cut the cost of repairing service by referring any
friend or it can also be achieved by group repairing campaign
where special discounts can be provided to customers who will
experience service in group (Gronroos & Gummerus, 2014).
Competitive Advantage-:
• Introduction of service via letters and brochures.
• Attend major fairs like international and local expos, seminars, and
business fairs et al.
• Creation of different packages in order to serve maximum customer base
within their budget
• Use word of mouth aptly

Distribution Strategy
• Here Content marketing can play major role in
distributing services (Hofacker et al., 2016).
With the help of blogs one can link articles too
related to your business: Maybe write reviews on
the most durable equipment(Dabholkar, 2015).
• People will get to know that this repairing center is
in a position to get avail the inventory for every
device that comes through doors for repair
(Kowalkowski, Windahl, Kindström & Gebauer,
2015).

Pricing Strategy
• Prices of services should be below the average
market rate for entire customer base by keeping
overhead low and collect advance payment from
corporate organizations who will hire these
services (Ostrom et al., 2015).
• Provide seasonal discounts (Bansal & Taylor, 2015).
• Abide the pricing model that can match contractors
or organizations’ bid to bag in government’s tender
and contracts (Rust & Kannan, 2016).

Promotion Strategy
• Use blog to the most effective way in order to entice
the idea of genuine publicity (Akaka & Vargo, 2015).
• Aware about public holidays and launch some
schemes or discount to increase sales during
holidays (Gummesson, 2017).
• Mark office premises on maps so that customer can
spot the office easily via GPS and it can be used as
marked place which will automatically promote the
business name and idea (Tran, 2017).

References
Akaka, M. A., & Vargo, S. L. (2015). Extending the context of service: from encounters to ecosystems. Journal of Services
Marketing, 29(6/7), 453-462.Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M., & Brennan, R. (2015). Marketing: an introduction. Pearson
Education.
Bansal, H. S., & Taylor, S. (2015). Investigating the relationship between service quality, satisfaction and switching intentions.
In Proceedings of the 1997 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference (pp. 304- 313). Springer, Cham.
Dabholkar, P. A. (2015). How to improve perceived service quality by increasing customer participation. In Proceedings of the
1990 academy of marketing science (AMS) annual conference (pp. 483-487). Springer, Cham.
Gronroos, C., & Gummerus, J. (2014). The service revolution and its marketing implications: service logic vs service- dominant
logic. Managing service quality, 24(3), 206-229.
Gummesson, E. (2017). From relationship marketing to total relationship marketing and beyond. Journal of services
marketing, 31(1), 16-19.
Hofacker, C. F., De Ruyter, K., Lurie, N. H., Manchanda, P., & Donaldson, J. (2016). Gamification and mobile marketing
effectiveness. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 34, 25-36.
Kowalkowski, C., Windahl, C., Kindström, D., & Gebauer, H. (2015). What service transition? Rethinking established
assumptions about manufacturers' service-led growth strategies. Industrial Marketing Management, 45, 59-69.
Leeflang, P. S., Verhoef, P. C., Dahlström, P., & Freundt, T. (2014). Challenges and solutions for marketing in a digital
era. European management journal, 32(1), 1-12.
Ostrom, A. L., Parasuraman, A., Bowen, D. E., Patricio, L., & Voss, C. A. (2015). Service research priorities in a rapidly changing
context. Journal of Service Research, 18(2), 127-159.
Rust, R. T., & Huang, M. H. (2014). The service revolution and the transformation of marketing science. Marketing
Science, 33(2), 206-221.
Rust, R. T., & Kannan, P. K. (2016). The era of e-service. In E-service: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 15-34).
Routledge.
Tran, H. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,842,337. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.