Impact of Contextual Marketing and Customer Orientation on Customer Relationship with the Brand in Pakistan’s Telecom Sector

Abstract

Over the past few years, we have seen evolution in the world of internet as well as marketing. New buzzword is Big Data. Big Data is the consumer data about his consuming behavior and personality traits. This data can be utilized by marketers to extract relevant consumer insights in order to design and deliver value to customers in real-time. This lays the foundation of contextual marketing and customer orientation. Study aims to prove that this is the need of the hour to shift focus from mass marketing to personalized marketing. Success of these strategies is evident in various sectors including e-Commerce, retailing and telecom sector globally. This study explores the impact of contextual marketing and customer orientation on the customer relationship with the brand in Telecom Sector of Pakistan. It further identifies perceived offer value as a mediating variable and discovers the moderating role of privacy concerns and offer complexity on the association of customer relationship with above mentioned marketing strategies. Survey method is used to test the hypotheses of the study. Questionnaire is used as a research instrument. The results of the study shows that integration of Contextual Marketing and Customer Orientation strategies establishes strong customer relationship with the brand which ultimately leads to profitability and good reputation of the organization. It also establishes the fact that if perception about the offer is increased via marketing and once a customer perceives that the service offered to him is of higher value, his relationship with the brand improves. Customer is concerned about privacy but if he trusts the organization he is willing to share his data for the convenience he gets with the context-based services. But complexity is detested by the customer and it impacts the customer relationship, he prefers offers that are simple in nature and easier to understand. Thus effectiveness of context-based offerings is evident in Telecom Industry. It can become a source of competitive advantage in this era of intensive competition.