Marketing and Bidding Policy

Patricia Hillebrandt and Jacqueline Cannon

Chapter 5 in The Modern Construction Firm, 1990, pp 63-77 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The construction industry has been very slow to recognise the advantages of marketing as a tool to improve performance either in terms of market shares, level of sales or profitability. The main reason for the slowness stems from the fact that for a very long period post-war — indeed up to 1973 — the workload on the industry rose gradually so that the industry was never really short of work in spite of the complaints about stop/go. In fact there was a sellers’ market. Another reason was that the major clients were in the public sector. Contractors’ major marketing effort was therefore not directed towards seeking work in a particular market area or from a certain client or group of clients, but towards getting on the tender list for construction work for central government, local authorities and nationalised industries. Their marketing behaviour towards the public-sector client was replicated where private clients were concerned. There was thus no need for them to put any effort into sophisticated marketing of their products since once on the tender list the dominant decision factor was that of price. Nor did they see the need to apply marketing techniques to increase their workload for the private sector.

Keywords: Head Office; Target Price; Market Selection; Marketing Function; Construction Firm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1990
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-13628-5_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349136285

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-13628-5_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().