Information Technology for Business Innovation: Analysis of Sonys Strategies - Case Study Example

?Information Technology for Business Innovation: Analysis of Sony’s Strategies By How has SONY used technology to better market to its global customers? In the past few years, the internet technologies have become a main driver of financial growth, in view of the fact that the innovation offered by the internet tools and technologies has not only the changed but as well modernized the formation of every kind of business corporation (regardless of their nature and size i.e. small, medium and large). On the other hand, the use of the internet for carrying out business activities has become as common as fax machine, telephone, and business cards are used to perform business tasks. However, this uncontrollable expansion and modernization of the internet have made business environment more competitive than ever before. In fact, the internet provides all the business organizations and individuals an equal opportunity to market as well as sell their products and services. Thus, over the internet every business organization in the world becomes a local competitor. Moreover, almost all the organizations at this time believe that the internet is a very supportive and helpful tool to better deal with customers and reach into the worldwide markets in order to catch more and more customers (Summers et al., 2003, p.67; Watson et al., 2000; Rao et al., 1998). Sony Corporation is a well-known producer of video, audio, communications, and a wide variety of information technology products for the customers and professional markets. In addition, Sony Corporation is a manufacturer of many other products such as television, motion picture, computer entertainment, music and online businesses, which make Sony one of the most comprehensive technology and entertainment corporations in the world. In its broad categories of products VAIO is a leading PC brand. In addition, MEC Corporation is one of the world’s leading media agency networks. As discussed above at the present use of the internet has become essential in order to run the business effectively. Sony Corporation is well aware of this fact. Thus, they hired the services of a world’s leading media agency in an attempt to promote their business. As discussed above, the majority of business organizations are using the internet to reach global markets. In the same way, Sony Corporation used the internet technology to reach more customers. In this scenario, they created a page on Facebook, which is a social network web site. Basically, a social network website, allows the people to create a profile by providing their personal information and interests uphold a list of friends and relatives and state their preferences for items like movies, music, or books. In addition, the Web-based environment of social networks makes it perfect for use in different ways that can take advantage of the users' social and personal data. At the present, these social networking sites (SNSs) have a great impact on the social life of many people, even more than millions of people that make use of these web sites directly (Conti et al., 2011; Golbeck, 2009). Thus, Sony Corporation has taken a great advantage of this wonderful technology, which has proven to be effective in case of its business marketing. According to their facts, “the development of this page was aimed at engaging the consumers with the product. In addition, this marketing campaign attracted more than 173,000 Facebook users that immediately connected to the Sony VAIO Page as of September 24, 2010, almost doubling the goal of attracting 90,000 users, also until 2011, above 380,000 people had connected to the Page.” (Case Study) Has SONY’s approach to marketing using its Information Technology been successful? Before we discuss SONY’s approach to marketing we must understand the basic concepts associated with the internet marketing. In their book (Ray, 2004, p.269), discuss the importance of the internet for the businesses. According to the author, the internet technology, similar to other technologies, is only a tool and it depends on a business how it gains benefits of this technology by making effective use of it. Though, the internet (especially the use of social networks as used by the SONY Corporation) is a best tool to catch the attention of new consumers, services offered ones enhanced, correspond to customers using more effectual and specialized ways, gather information regarding customers choices as well as access it quickly, and buy and sell more products. In addition, a lot of business organizations have attempted to make use of the Internet as successfully much more than it is (Ray, 2004, p. 269). For instance, Godiva Chocolatier (http://www.godiva.com/welcome.aspx), which is a chocolate producer, built a very gainful and attractive website to expand its business and catch the attention of more customers. This web site allows its customers to purchase and shop for chocolates. According to the director of Godiva Direct (Kim Land), “this web site helped them generate a lot of revenue.” Moreover, within the time period of only two years, their sales had increased up to 70 percent per year. Hence, Sony’s approach for marketing is an excellent imitative for their business development (Stair & Reynolds, 2003, pp.17-18). The internet marketing helps an organization carry a stable stream of targeted traffic eventually. In addition, the internet offers a wide variety of techniques for marketing such as (Paul, 1996): Giving Away Freebies Blogging Opt-in Lists Social Networking Sites Article Marketing Pay per Click Social Bookmarking Sites It is clear from the literature that the success of the business in the current business environment heavily depends on the usage of the internet. Keeping in mind the usefulness of the internet Sony Corporation formed a marketing strategy. They used Facebook (a social network website which has been discussed above) for marketing their new product ‘VAIO’. According to the case study, “the goal of using this marketing technique was to increase the number of people who connected to its Page from 10,000 to 90,000 in 10 weeks. As part of building a long-term social media strategy, MEC created a Paid-Owned-Earned strategy that put Facebook at the heart of the internet marketing.” This marketing approach worked very well for the business and as a result of this campaign more than 173,000 Facebook users connected to the Sony VAIO Page as of September 24, 2010, nearly doubling the 90,000 goal. By early 2011, more than 380,000 people had connected to the Page. Additionally, more than 229,000 Facebook users voted on the 10,740 playlists created, exceeding the 100,000 expected. In addition, the users spent an average of 7:00 minutes interacting with the Sony VAIO Page, topping the hoped-for 5:00 minutes. Moreover, the page views of the Sony VAIO Page reached 432,000 in consequence of the campaign. In conclusion, Sony’s approach to marketing through the internet was very successful. The company has achieved all the goals by making effective use of the internet. Furthermore, the use this marketing technique also helped Sony Corporation gain more popularity among people. If you were in charge of SONYs online marketing programme, what emerging online technologies would you suggest for increasing your social media presence? In the past few years, the use of the internet for the carrying out the business tasks such as marketing and promotion has augmented amazingly. Many researches prove and support being of encouraging consequences of using the internet on a company’s competitive edge. In fact, the use of the internet has turned out to be increasingly trendy these days, in view of the fact that the operating expense of creating, maintaining, and accessing the internet and web site is comparatively less as compared to carrying out these tasks in a physical environment. The majority of business organizations, at the moment make use of the internet to collect and distribute or publish information to and from actual and prospective consumers, and progressively for end-consumer business transactions using electronic commerce (Khodaparasti, 2009). Above all, the internet services for instance multimedia and animation integrated with other internet applications and technologies such as, personal communication and email support for group offers a wide variety of methods for communicating with consumers (Watson et al., 2000; Dewan et al., 1999). Marketing is the backbone of any business firm. The emergence of the web based marketing and promotional platforms has improved the way organizations market their business. If I were in-charge of SONY’s marketing programme, I would adopt a number of ways and techniques through which we can expand our presence on the web. SONYs online marketing programme at the present is working with the Facebook and taking a great advantage customers’ interest. This technique has helped the firm improve its business position and increase popularity among people. However, by expanding SONYs social media presence we can also increase the overall business market standing and business access to customers. One of the main strategies that I would adopt is about online offers and email marketing. In this scenario, any person who viewed SONY’s FaceBook page will be informed via email for new promotions. These promotions can include new offers or information regarding new product. I would also make use of the mobile marketing service. The mobile marketing and promotion has now turned out to be one of the well-known marketing platforms. Hence, by making use of the mobile marketing platforms we can make our business more popular among common people. In this scenario, live alerts and promotions ads marketing on the mobile will offer a great deal of support for SONYs business marketing. I would use another web technology that is known as a social network (we have discussed in the above sections). Though, Sony Coporation has already been using Facebook to promote its business but there are so many other social networking sites. This technique will also offer an excellent support for the business to increase its social presence. In this scenario, we can connect the business to Twitter or LinkedIn. Such social networks also offer a large number of followers that can contribute to the business marketing. Through application of all these tools and techniques we can be able to increase the business power and make the business to evolve in a much better way. A web site is an excellent tool for the business marketing. Though, Sony Coporation has its own web site. But I would add more links (taking toward social networks and advertisement banners, promotions and offers) into the web site. It will offer a capability to promote the business in an easy way. What challenges do you see with implementing the technologies you suggested in question #3 (above)? The use of the internet brings a lot of opportunities for the businesses but it also brings certain disappointments. While making use of the web based platform for marketing or dealing the main risk or challenge we can face is information security. These days, information security and privacy has turned out to be one of the most important aspects for businesses as well as customers. In fact, the majority of businesses and clients hesitate about using the internet for business transactions and shopping. Hence, for SONY’s online marketing platform application and improving its overall online presence we would need to plan and implement an information security policy. Through the implementation of a security policy we can better assure our customers regarding security which we can offer to our customers online. It will help to increase customers’ level of confidence. Another main challenge we can face is about technology support. Here each social network and user platform offers different technology features and working aspects. Here we need such technology that can compensate all the technology needs and requirements. One main challenge that we can face online is about the scope of business services. While defining the scope of business services we need to define the business needs and requirements. After this we will assess the available technologies and tools that can better support our requirements. While defining business services and support we need to define business capacities and potential. For SONY’s marketing and promotion campaign, we need to plan and define our requirements very carefully. Piracy is also an important issue for the businesses that produce technological products.. In such scenario the overall business capacities and control over the business fail because of piracy related issues and aspects. Here, we need to implement a well planned strategy and policy to tackle such aspects regarding piracy. In addition, we need to recognize such issues regarding the SONY business and plan in a better way to manage and handle such issues. Before Sony launches a product on the internet, it must have the copyrights of the products so that no other business could copy it. Bibliography Conti, M., Hasani, A. & Crispo, B., 2011. Virtual private social networks. In CODASPY '11 Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy. New York, 2011. ACM. Dewan, R., Jing, B. & Seidmann, A., 1999. One-to-one marketing on the internet. In International Conference on Information Systems, Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Information Systems. Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, 1999. Association for Information Systems Atlanta, GA, USA. Golbeck, J., 2009. Trust and nuanced profile similarity in online social networks. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 3(4), p.12. Khodaparasti, R.B., 2009. The Role of Internet in Marketing Strategies. Review of International Comparative Management, 10(4), pp.816-25. Paul, P., 1996. Marketing on the Internet. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 13(4), pp.27-39. Rao, H.R., Salam, A.F. & DosSantos, B., 1998. Marketing and the Internet. Communications of the ACM, 41(3), pp.32-34. Ray, R., 2004. Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses. New York: American Management Association (AMACOM). Stair, R.M. & Reynolds, G.W., 2003. Principles of Information Systems, Sixth Edition. Toronto : Thomson Learning, Inc. Summers, J. et al., 2003. Essentials of Marketing. Australia: Thomosn. Watson, R.T., Zinkhan, G.M. & Pitt, L.F., 2000. Integrated Internet marketing. Communications of the ACM, 43(6), pp.97-102. Read More