The Impact of Product, Price, Promotion and Place/Logistics on Customer Satisfaction and Share of Business

Customer service has been a topic in marketing and logistics research for many decades. Much of the research was functionally focused and lacked the integration of logistics customer service with the other components of the Marketing Mix (price, product and promotion). In addition many prior studies focused only on a single industry and there is little replication and limited possibilities for generalizability. This shortcoming is alleviated in this research by using a multi-industry approach that allows for replication across the samples. The focus of this research was on business-to business relationships in several industries, health care, electronics, plastics, and sporting goods. The goals of the research were to test a general model that across multiple samples and industries and to understand where differences occur. The outcome variables are customer satisfaction and share of business. The results show that the impact of each component of the Marketing Mix varies by sample. In no two samples do the same components of the Marketing Mix show a significant impact on customer satisfaction. This does not diminish the importance of the Marketing Mix, but it shows that a careful evaluation of individual samples is necessary. The impact of customer satisfaction on share of business is significant in most samples, but not all of them. As a result of this research future researchers should investigate why differences occur between the samples. Managers should take away that they must perform customer service studies in their own company and that the studies must be repeated in regular intervals.