Introduction

This report presents a content analysis of water utility industry literature, following a grounded theory based methodology proposed by Wolfswinkel et al. (2011), combined with network analysis and community identification.

Define

Define the criteria for inclusion/exclusion

This investigation analyses industry publications on water utility management. Industry publications were chosen because they provide an insight into activities in this industry.

Identify the fields of research

The field of research is marketing, which for the purpose of this review is defined as viewing an organisation from the customer’s perspective. Although most articles are not written with marketing in mind, they can nevertheless be reviewed from a marketing perspective. Product quality, customer perceptions, pricing, distributions systems are topic regularly discussed within the industry.

Determine the appropriate sources

The IWA publishes 13 English language peer reviewed Journals, all of which were included in this review.

Decide on the specific search terms

The specific search terms for inclusion are: Consumer, Marketing, Customer

  • Marketing was chosen to test for specific reference to the discipline.
  • Customer and Consumer where chosen to obtain articles that mention customers.

Inclusion of these terms in the abstracts of these articles implies salience of the term. Other articles use different labels to denote customers, such as houseold, public and community.

Select

Refine the sample

The search results were screened to assess their suitability for analysis. Unsuitable entries were removed for three reasons:

  • References to pages without journal article abstract. e.g.. journal table of contents and magazine articles.
  • Foreign language articles
  • Content not related to the retail of tap water e.g. bottled water, sanitation, agricultural supply or wholesale of water

Abstracts were also rejected when they only mention the customer’s tap, without any further mention of the impact to customers themselves.

IWA journal search results.
Consumer Customer Marketing Sum
No article 33 70 9 112
Not English 4 0 0 4
Not retail 138 33 59 230
Selected 121 104 19 244
Sum 296 207 87 590

Keywords per year.

This results in a total of 244 search hits selected for analysis. The search hits contained 225 unique journal abstracts, some of which contain multiple keywords.

Abstracts and keywords per journal.
Journal Abstracts Consumer Customer Marketing Keywords
WST: Water Supply 67 27 44 8 79
Water Science and Technology 52 31 17 5 53
Water Research 33 25 8 2 35
Journal of Water Supply, Research and Technology—Aqua 23 9 13 1 23
Water Policy 17 11 9 1 21
Water Practice and Technology 17 7 10 0 17
Journal of Water and Health 12 10 0 2 12
Journal of Hydroinformatics 3 1 2 0 3
Water Quality Research Journal of Canada 1 0 1 0 1
Hydrology Research 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Water and Climate Change 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Water Reuse and Desalination 0 0 0 0 0
Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 0 0 0 0 0
TOTAL 225 121 104 19 244

Analyse

Open coding

28 codes were assigned to the abstracts, with an average of 2.6 codes per abstract.

Code frequencies.

Code memos.
code memo
Involvement A person’s perceived relevance of the product or service, based on their inherent needs, values and interests (Zaichkowsky, 1985)
Consumer Behaviour Process through which an identifiable group of consumers actually make buying decisions. Any study of consumer buying behaviour must also include the forces that influence them in making their decisions in their final choice of a brand at a given time, place, and price (Doyle, 2011).
Marketing Concept A business orientation or philosophy that holds that organizational success is dependent upon the efficient identification of the needs and wants of target markets and customers and the effective satisfaction of them (Doyle, 2011).
Segmentation Different groupings of customers with wants and needs who require different products (Doyle, 2011).
Price Ceiling The price which customers are willing to pay for a perception of value from the product or service, based upon what the product or service is worth to them. This is sometimes described as ‘what the market will bear (Doyle, 2011).
Social Marketing Applies commercial marketing principles to the propagation of ideas and behaviours that should bring about social benefit and change (Doyle, 2011).
Product Acceptance The measurement of the degree to which the launch of a product or service has been successful in its target market (Doyle, 2011).
Customer Satisfaction The evaluation of a product or service as meeting or exceeding the consumer need and expectation (Doyle, 2011).
Service Quality The consumer’s subjective, perceived impression of the standards of an organization’s service to its public (Doyle, 2011). Service quality for water utilities includes public health.
Regulation Enforcement of standard by government agencies.
Privatisation Any aspects related to the ownership of water utilities.
Competition The rival activities between enterprises trying to increase sales, profits, or market share while addressing the same set of customers within a similar target market. Competition is critical in a free-market economy and is the dynamic that drives marketing processes (Doyle, 2011). Competition includes all alternatives for potable water supply, including home filtration units.
Supply Chain The sequence of processes that move a product or service from its production point to the point of availability to the consumer (Doyle, 2011).
CRM A systematic fostering of good reciprocal relationships with existing customers, on the basis that this will provide new or ongoing business from that customer with more ease and speed, and less cost, than winning and developing new customers. An information system for gathering and analysing information and intelligence on existing clients with a view to deepening knowledge, improving relationships, and growing sales to that customer (Doyle, 2011).
Pricing Indicator of the value that a product or service can command in a marketplace (Doyle, 2011).
Asset Management An integrative optimisation process that enables a utility to determine how to minimise the total life-cycle cost of owning and operating infrastructure assets while continuously delivering the service levels customers desire (Causey, 2005).
Demarketing Attempt to temporarily or permanently reduce demand and limit future growth (Doyle, 2011).
Consumption Rate at which a product or commodity is consumed or used (Hart & Stapleton, 2012).
Product Image Perception that the consumer has of a product or service, including value judgements and emotional responses, therefore not always an accurate assessment of the product or service’s true effectiveness (Doyle, 2011).
Communication Providing information to customers about water quality, projects, water usage and other issues.
Complaint Expression of customer dissatisfaction which can directly affect the company or organization’s permanent reputation (Doyle, 2011).
Brand Image The perception of the brand in the minds of consumers. One of the major roles of brand is to create positive perceptions in the minds of target customer groups; these perceptions constitute the brand image. A key measure of the success of the brand image is the preference that customers show towards this brand over other competing brands. This is closely connected to brand and repeat purchases of the branded products and services by the customer (Doyle, 2011).
Market Research Intelligence gathering and analysis on a particular market, industry, geography, customer group, competitors, or specific product or service area (Doyle, 2011). Includes references to public participation.
Billing Providing the customer information regarding water consumption and amount payable.
Customer Expectations Customers’ needs and wants of goods and services measured against a certain standard that they hold (Doyle, 2011).
Benchmarking A technique by which a company tries to emulate or exceed standards achieved, or processes adopted, by another company in order to improve its own performance. Sometimes referred to as best practices, exemplary practices, or business excellence, benchmarking is used in marketing to decide on comparative advantages of competitors and to advise on gaps in the marketplace between competitors. It can also be a collaborative process among a group of companies to focus on specific operating practices, compare measures and results and identify improved processes within their organizations (Doyle, 2011).
Coproduction The customer is a coproducer of service. Marketing is a process of doing things in interaction with the customer. The customer is primarily an operant resource, only functioning occasionally as an operand resource (Vargo & Lush, 2004).
Product Quality The group of features and characteristics of a saleable good which determine its desirability and which can be controlled by a manufacturer to meet certain basic requirements. Most businesses that produce goods for sale have a product quality or assurance department that monitors outgoing products for consumer acceptability. Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/product-quality.html#ixzz3ZdCmiGNp. Quality defined from the provider’s perspective.

Axial coding

Axial coding was undertaken by converting the code structure to an adjacency matrix, which can be analysed using network modeling techniques.

IWA Journal theme network.

Each vertex represents a code identified in the open coding stage. The edges represent relationships between codes by them being used within the same abstract. The size of the vertices is proportional to the degree of the node. The thickness of the edges is proportional to its weight.

Selective coding

Selective coding was undertaken using the community detection algorithms.

Communities of discourse in IWA journals.

Present

Word frequency diagram IWA abstracts.