AS Level Answer Guide: Marketing - 4Cs, Packaging and E-Commerce

1.  'The 4Cs marketing model is more useful for a retail business than the 4Ps marketing model.'  Do you agree with this statement? Justify your view. (20 marks) [9609/12/M/J/16]

Suggested is an outline of what you can write for this question.

1. Explain what do the 4Ps and 4Cs cover Also, state which model represents the company-centric view and another the customer-centric view.
2. Explain how the customer solution view is more superior than the product view. Give examples to illustrate your understanding. You should explain the problem using the product concept in 4Ps as it may carry the risk of product creation that result in the disconnect between what the company wants to design and produce and what the customers are looking for.  This can have the potential to result in marketing failure.  With the concept of customer solution, company will always put themselves in the position of identifying what problems the consumers are currently facing in their life and introduce a product that can specifically address that problem.  You can a (brief) example to illustrate your understanding of the application product and customer solution concept.
3. Explain how the customer costs concept is more comprehensive in its scope as it does not look at the amount of monetary costs paid to acquire and consume a product but include time costs, energy (physical effort)costs, and psychological costs.
4. Marketing communication concept will force the business enterprise to look at purpose of communication initiated towards the target audience rather than merely consider the various media to be used.
5. Convenience will often have companies to think about how well can they use the various platform of distribution, ordering, and delivery to make their products more available and accessible to the target market without having them to incur too much costs in ordering and acquiring those products.
6. You can argue that the use of 4Cs in general is better model than the traditional 4Ps regardless the business is in the retail or manufacturing sector.
7. However, you can then mention that even the 4Cs model have its limitation as it did not include certain additional marketing element which are presented in the 7Ps model that are specifically designed for service business.  Then you should go about how retail business as service business will find the concepts People, Process, and Physical Evidence to be highly important consideration in the marketing mix when compared against manufacturing business.
8. Conclude how the 4Cs model is more comprehensive when compared to the 4Ps model.

2. (a) Analyse, using examples, why packaging could be important in marketing mix. (8 marks)[9609/12/O/N/16]

1. To answer this well, you need to explain how packaging is useful and therefore important.
2. Packaging enable business to easily transport the product for easy distribution and delivery.
3. Packaging is important to protect the product being sold as to prevent it becoming damaging or spoiled which will eventually leads to the dissatisfaction of the customers.
4. Packaging can provide some functional benefits to add value to the products purchased.  Think about Starbuck's cover and holder for the hot coffee.  You can use other ideas.
5. Packaging can help distinguish one brand over the another providing competitive differentiation and even unique selling point.  Enable customer to easily identify the brand through the shape, colours, and design of the packaging.
6. Good packaging have the potential to provide emotional fulfillment (through delivering hedonic value).
7. Packaging designed and introduced in certain ways can provide opportunity for business to establish a position of high quality and therefore allow it to charge their products at premium price.
8. Packaging is a significant element that help build brand personality by conveying certain values through its design, colours, and to some extent even shape.

Note: Some students can even look at the concept of packaging in broader terms which can include the retail environment and consider how the retail service is 'packaged' in certain manner to provide some specific value and build a brand personality.  This idea must be supported with the use of an example. 

Since the question only asks to analyse, students are not required to discuss to what extent packaging is important to the marketing mix which may force them to compare with the other marketing mix elements.

It is recommended that students should focus on 3 or 4 of the above ideas, giving each of the idea at least an example to support in order to illustrate your understanding.


2. (b) Discuss factors that could determine the success of a business that has decided to set up an online shop to sell beauty products. (12 mark) [9609/12/O/N/16]

Following are some ideas in which students can use and elaborate.  As this question contains the key action word, 'Discuss', students have to look at both sides of the identified factors by evaluating how on one side, the factors can be supportive of the business and have potential to bring it to success, and on other side, give argument how some of the factors can be difficulty to adopt due to certain limitations and may carry risks that will bring detriments to the company.

1. Promotion/Marketing Communication - there is no point having the 'best' product in the world if people don't know about it or cannot see what the benefits are and how they are superior as compared to the competitors.
2. Mobile platform - businesses nowadays cannot just operate electronically via Internet, they need to consider to complement their channel activities with the use of mobile technology.
3. Social media - there are growing number of people using social media, you need to consider how social media can be used by the beauty product company, to communicate, converse, and build customer relationship with its target market.  You may want to relate to the concept of 'customer engagement'.  However, use of social media can result in business to lose control over how their brand can be projected.  Also, there is a great risk if whenever a negative comment is posted up and the company is slow to respond or fail to respond tactfully.  Note: In terms of responding to customers, its customer-contact staff may need to have some degree of emotional intelligence to be have empathy and can determine the most appropriate manner to communicate.
4. Tactfulness and responsiveness of the back-end people in responding to the inquiries, complaints and comments on the electronic platform (particularly Facebook).
5. Logistic consideration - how fast and safe can the product be delivered?
6. Price - could the products be sold at cheaper price since it is being marketed on the online platform where there is less overheads to deal with as the business is purely online.
7. Variety - how many varieties of different beautfy products are made available? Should having a very wide variety of products be beneficial.
8. Channel conflict - assess how this can negatively impact a business in the future if they wish to later sell it to physical retails.
9. Design of the website - is it easy-to-navigate and pleasing to the eyes to see?
10. Other value added features - what other value added features you suggest? You may want to explore the application of augmented reality, wishlist, video tutorial on teaching consumers how to (properly) use the product, community forum to encourage sharing  and fulfill some emotional needs within the consumers (such as social, ego, and self-actualization), easy pay system, notification on the status of the product, etc.  Consider the costs to adopt some of the features mentioned above.

You are not required to answer all the above ideas listed above.  Just choose some like 5 or 6 and then be able to elaborate on them.  Always choose those ideas in which you can elaborate well. REMEMBER TO DISCUSS.