Vanguard
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Vanguard known as the mutual fund industry’s growth leader, has targeted customers seeking low cost and long term investing in mutual funds. Vanguards unique pricing strategy was to retain existing customers and eventually get them to invest more over time, pushing assets up faster. Vanguard is more interested in gaining long -term customers rather than short- term investors. Vanguard has not targeted short -term investors because they believe it ruins the game for the long -term investor. Vanguard relies heavily on customer loyalty and believes that its company’s success stems from making the long-term customer happy. Most of Vanguards customers are retail companies and organizations like hospitals and universities due to employees pension plans. After thorough marketing research and the ever-changing trends facing the market, Vanguard reorganized its activities to better manage its customers. They organized them by putting them into four client segments, full service institutional, investment only institutional, core retail and high-net-worth retail. Reorganizing these activities has allowed Vanguard to centralize customer relationship management. Vanguard stands out from many of its competitors like Citigroup because it views the market from a narrow approach by focusing just on one particular service and being better at it than its competitors. Vanguards philosophy is about staying focused on who they are and what they do without getting sidetracked by competitors trying to be everything to the customer.
Advertising and direct marketing was never a key interest to Vanguard. Now, with competitors like Citibank merging to become full service financial companies Vanguard realized its need to take control of its brand integrity. After much success with the advertising campaign in 2002, Vanguard encountered concerns of spending money on advertising and direct marketing. Most of Vanguards existing customers admire the fact that the company doesn’t