Title: Strategies for competition – a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.
Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.
Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.
Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.
Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.
Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers. The Internet based businesses conception about their customer is more in line with the customer groups about the company and their service. These customers do recommend their optician.
Result: In the result it can be concluded that the traditional opticians should change to a service perspective as their comprehensive strategic perspective, which means that the relation with the customer is the most important for the company. The Internet bases businesses should continue working from a price perspective since they have huge economy of scales.
Keywords: Customer value, strategies for competition, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.