LP4.1 Assignment: Jordan’s Furniture
This assignment will assess the following competencies: 1. Analyze effective marketing theories and principles,and5.Appraise the effectiveness of various marketing strategies.
Directions
After reading Unique Customer Experiences at Jordan’s Furniture, and based on your readings from our textbook, write a 300-400 word essay in which you address the following questions:
• Customers have expectations of the businesses that they patronize. What expectations would someone entering a Jordan’s Furniture store for the first time likely have?
• What expectations would a loyal, repeat customer of Jordan’s Furniture likely have?
• Sometimes companies approach customer relationship management differently for new customers than they do for loyal, repeat customers. Does Jordan’s approach to customer relationship management differentiate between new customers and loyal customers? Explain your answer.
The paper must be researched using at least two scholarly or professional marketing resources, as well as the textbook. The references must be cited and properly placed on the reference page using APA formatting
LP4 Assignment
LP4.1 Assignment: Jordan’s Furniture
This assignment will assess the following competencies: 1. Analyze effective marketing theories and principles,and5.Appraise the effectiveness of various marketing strategies.
Directions
After reading Unique Customer Experiences at Jordan’s Furniture, and based on your readings from our textbook, write a 300-400 word essay in which you address the following questions:
• Customers have expectations of the businesses that they patronize. What expectations would someone entering a Jordan’s Furniture store for the first time likely have?
• What expectations would a loyal, repeat customer of Jordan’s Furniture likely have?
• Sometimes companies approach customer relationship management differently for new customers than they do for loyal, repeat customers. Does Jordan’s approach to customer relationship management differentiate between new customers and loyal customers? Explain your answer.
The paper must be researched using at least two scholarly or professional marketing resources, as well as the textbook. The references must be cited and properly placed on the reference page using APA formatting
LP4.1 Assignment: Jordan’s Furniture
Unique Customer Experiences at Jordan’s Furniture
Founded in 1918 and known as One Acquisition, Inc. until 1999, Jordan’s Furniture Company operates several furniture retail outlets in the Greater Boston area. Jordan’s, which is based in East Taunton, Massachusetts, also has stores in Avon, Natick, and Reading, Massachusetts as well as in Nashua, New Hampshire. The company is opening another location in Warwick, Rhode Island in the autumn of 2011.
Jordan’s is not a run-of-the-mill furniture store. Yes, it sells furniture for living rooms, bedrooms, kid’s rooms, and home offices, as well as formal and casual dining furniture, area rugs, and sleep surfaces. But Jordan’s furniture is very different in terms of the experiences provided to its customers.
At the Avon store, for example, potential customers are lured in with the Laser Imagination Theater Experience (LITE) and the Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM). The Laser Imagination Theater Experience is a “high-energy laser light show set to the rock songs of Boston.” Jordan’s touts this as “an amazing, one-of-a-kind soundtrack with high-powered, solid-state laser and Hollywood-style special effects.” The Motion Odyssey Movie features Yogi Bear and his faithful pal Boo-Boo, voiced respectively by Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake, in a zany new 4-D Ride adventure that places patrons in the middle of the fun of swiping picnic baskets.
A different customer experience is provided in the Natick, Massachusetts store, which is designed to resemble Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Customers are made to feel as though they are walking through the French Quarter, and “there’s even a 9-minute Mardi Gras FX show, complete with interactive animatronics and a full-sized riverboat.” Along Bourbon Street is “a fun little ice cream stand” named a Streetcar Named Dessert; it is a full-sized trolley car from which Jordan’s sells all sorts of tasty treats. Proceeds from the Streetcar Named Dessert ice cream wagon have been donated to a number of local and national charitable organizations, including: Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Southwest Middlesex, Boys and Girls Clubs of MetroWest, Project Bread, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the United Way.
The Jordan’s Furniture store in Reading is home to Beantown, a replica of Downtown Boston made up of nearly twenty-five million Jelly Belly jelly beans. Beantown in Reading includes such Boston-themed attractions as Fenway’s Green Monster, the old Sweet House, the ‘Big Dig’ ice cream shop, the Lenny Zakim Bridge, and a Liquid Fireworks show.” The Reading store also has a Trapeze Style New York (TSNY), where people can take trapeze lessons.
These are only a few examples of the varied, exciting experiences awaiting Jordan’s customers. The fun experiences draw people in and many of them end up making furniture purchases. And of those making furniture purchases, many become repeat customers.
Jordan’s takes other unique some might even say bizarre approaches to stimulating sales. For instance, in the Spring of 2007, Jordan’s “attracted the attention of New England [baseball] fans, media, and sport marketers with an innovative promotion entitled ‘Jordan’s Monster Deal.’ In television commercials, [Barry Tatelman, Jordan’s CEO and president,] enthusiastically announced: ‘EVERY Sofa, EVERY Sectional, EVERY Dining Table, EVERY Bed, EVERY Mattress … can be YOURS FREE if the Red Sox win the World Championship in 2007’.” Customers who purchased sofas, dining tables, beds or mattresses from Jordan’s between March 7, 2007 and April 16, 2007 and who took delivery prior to the date of the 2007 All-Star Game, would be eligible for a full refund if the Boston Red Sox won the 2007 World Series. The Boston Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies in four games, and Jordan’s paid off backed by insurance, of course.
In the following year, Jordan’s offered a similar promotion, though with more rigorous requirements: the promotion period was eight days shorter than in 2007 and the Red Sox had to win the first four games of the World Series. The red Sox did not make it to the World Series in 2008.
So, what is the impact of all these entertaining, engaging, fun even seemingly bizarre approaches to creating a total customer experience? Jordan’s has one of the highest furniture sales per square foot in America.
SOURCE: This case was written for this textbook by Michael K. McCuddy, The Louis S. and Mary L. Morgal Chair of Christian Business Ethics and Professor of Management, College of Business Administration, Valparaiso University. © 2013 Cengage Learning.