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Today¡¦s marketing environment is increasingly more difficult than the marketing environment of past decades. Liquorland is Australia¡¦s widest distributor of alcohol but that doesn¡¦t stop it from facing a large field of competitors. These competitors include liquor retailers such as Dan Murphy¡¦s, Woolworth¡¦s Liquor and a large amount of independent liquor retailers. Liquorland¡¦s marketing strategy must ensure that their target market, which is any person over the legal age, would choose Liquorland above any other similar retailer to meet their needs. Liquorland operates Australia wide and is part of the Coles-Myer Corporation. It operates adjacent to Coles Supermarkets and is intended to attract Coles customers who had either planned to buy alcohol or made a spur of the moment decision to purchase alcohol. Understanding the Value Exchange Framework can help Liquorland achieve its objectives by understanding their customers needs better by focusing on customer value. This concept of ¡§customer value¡¨ poses a great difficulty for some companies, it is hard to define exactly what customer value is and this definition will be discussed at a later stage, but a strong focus upon customer value will indeed help a company increase its sales and increase its customer base (Gabbot, 2003, p 25). Providing value to customers should be an organizations main objective and in by doing so, groups affiliated with the organization such as alliance partners (e.g.-suppliers, distributor) and stakeholders will also gain maximum value. Previous marketing frameworks have focused on the importance of the four P¡¦s (products, pricing, promotion and place), but this framework has been called into question over the past decade because it fails to identify the essence of value exchange and recognise marketing as an ¡§innovative or adaptive force¡¨. The VEF (Value Exchange Framework) is a value driven marketing framework which is much more relevant to the modern marketing environment while still addressing the fundamental stages of the marketing process. ƒæ What is customer value? Porter (1985) defines value as simply ¡§what people are prepared to pay¡¨ (Gabbot, 2003, pg 23), however this definition if value is very narrow when it comes to customers.
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