Marketing Director – Claudia Vernon

Our Marketing Director, Claudia Vernon, heads the marketing department at Richer Sounds. She and her colleagues undertake a wide range of activities which can be grouped into four main areas. Marketing. A key activity of marketing is to analyse feedback from customers and information about competitors to identify our future marketing strategy. This helps us to decide how to advertise and promote our products and our business. Design. Colleagues in this section produce our in-store A3 newsletters which we issue every fortnight as well as our advertisements which we place in the national press and in specialist magazines.
All our original point-of-sale materials (such as our signs, price tickets and leaflets) are created by the designers. Point-of-sale. POS is headed by our Merchandising Director, Dan Burnham. He and his team are responsible for keeping all our stores looking as interesting and lively as possible. This includes everything from the fixtures, fittings, lighting and flooring to our notices and posters. Whereas design is responsible for the creation of POS materials, POS is responsible for keeping these up-to-date.
Historically we used to send out price tickets and other product related POS materials to our stores once a week. The disadvantage is that this is slow and costly. We price ourselves on being very competitive on price and will lower our prices as soon as we see someone else is cheaper. To help us to do this quickly, we are now using a system of instant ticketing which allows the stores to create their own tickets from our EPOS system. They can print anything up to A3 in size, in full colour. We are using one of the most advanced systems of its kind.

Because the system is linked to the tills, this means that stores can be informed that a product has changed price or a new product has been added and the ticket is ready to print immediately. This saves us money and enables us to react much quicker to changes. Customer service is very important to us because we have built our reputation on offering value for money products and superb customer service. A detailed explanation about how we deliver this level of customer service is given in Unit 2.
The following information should help to give you an overview of our views about customer service and how it is organised in Richer Sounds. This isn’t very easy – simply because everyone at Richer Sounds is involved in customer service – at every level. To illustrate this, it might help you to know that on our induction course all colleagues are given our organisation chart – with the customer at the top! In our view, the customer is the most important person in our organisation.
The Director in charge of the customer service department is John Clayton. Customer service support colleagues and the call centre both report to John, who is also responsible for our Store Operations. This is because excellent customer service is all our stores is absolutely paramount. Lindon Bolt is our Service Manager. He is in charge of our service and repairs department. Lindon and his engineers are very important as they enable us to offer excellent after-sales service to all our customers.
Our HiFi Direct department, is headed by Ricky Faust who is also involved in providing excellent customer service – this time to our HiFi direct customers and anyone placing an order by mail order or over the Internet. For example Avon have a very big research and development building and in that building they have scientists etc to improve there products and also to see if they can make new product better and improve it. They also have very new machinery for example they have this sort of camera that takes a picture maybe of your shirt and they can make a colour that matches your shirt exactly.
How each function works with another one in Richer Sounds? Each function area in richer sounds works together through lots of Communication and if there was none of this then each business function would not work very well together. They would also have very important Meetings with each functional manager for example Julia richer as he is the chief executive of Richer Sounds. To see how each functional area is doing and what they may be struggling on and get suggestions on how to improve it. Also the Aims and objectives help them to focus and make the workers want to achieve them which increase motivation in the workers.