Information Technology - Essay Example

Running Head: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Information Technology of In this paper the will discuss the case study of Pill Inc., a pharmaceutical conglomerate based in NJ. Pill Incorporated needs to grow internationally and is targeting at the seniors market in the USA. The company wants to sell and advertise the new company products, Liflex and Forevex, using the Internet. The research for these pills took eighteen years and 225 million dollars in investment. For a while now the company stock price has been clearly depending on the promise of these new drugs. The company needs return on its investment soon. The writer will discuss the use of email in this situation. The writer will further discuss the possibilities of only emailing to senior citizens of United States. Finally all the implications of this project t will be discussed. All the research material will be presented in APA style of report writing. Information Technology In the given situation "Pill Incorporated" pharmaceutical conglomerate, wants to develop globally and is targeting at the seniors market in the USA. Pill incorporated wants to trade and advertise the new company products, Liflex and Forevex, using the Internet. The research for Liflex and Forevex took eighteen years and 225 million dollars in investment. Firstly one has to research about the usage of Internet and online services of the seniors of United States. The Internet has flashed a mutiny in the last ten years, producing important and considerable transformations in the techniques organizations perform business and persons do their every day responsibilities. Though the initial "boom" of opulence for new online businesses wrecked with the 1990s, its reputation and status demonstrate no indication of reduction. As the rate of Internet usage and the number of persons using it raise, it will turn out to be more vital for the means to supply information in a proficient and usable mode. It is particularly true for senior citizens, whose requirements and abilities vary notably from those of young. (Kaufman, 1999) At present, senior citizens comprise the best ever increasing Internet user group. One aspect that may give details of this drift is the aging populace. It has been anticipated that by 2025 there will be sixty five million US senior citizens, approximately double as many as there are at present. As this populace increases, so also will the number of senior citizens using online services. The Internet presents a number of gains for senior citizens. It is used as a means of communication via E-mail, chat rooms, debate groups, direct messaging, and so forth. It is found that ninety five percent of seniors who use the Internet do so to remain in touch with associates and relatives. Keeping this significant information regarding the Internet usage of seniors Pill Incorporated will have to advertise about its products Liflex and Forevex on the sites of messaging services. Pill Incorporated has two options whether to paste their advertisement of Liflex and Forevex through a banner on the sites of messaging services providing a hyperlink to the official web site of Pill incorporated. (Steve, 1998) Another way is that Pill incorporated can send their email messages about Liflex and Forevex through using the messenger services databases of seniors residing in United States. Another important trend found among the seniors of United States using Internet and online services is the selling of useless goods for them through e-markets and e-stores such as ebay. So Pill incorporated should set an online store on such e-markets like ebay to reach the target market of seniors of United States using Internet. The Internet also provides a wealth of health care information that can be predominantly valuable for the seniors when healthiness turns out to be a larger matter and concern. Seventy five percent of elder Internet users collect health care information on line. The search engines like google, yahoo, and dogpile are main sources to access this information. These companies take some amount of money from online sellers depending upon the competition of online sellers of a product to provide the link of their websites on top when a person uses search engines to get information using a key word related to a product. (Edieal, et. al, 2003) So Pill Incorporated should pay to google only for United States region to provide the link of Pill Inc. web site on top whenever a person uses google to search information about seniors’ health care. Another way of attracting seniors of United States for Pill Inc. is that the company should provide research articles regarding the health care issues of elders of United States by the leading researchers of the field with authentication. If Pill Inc. will be able to develop the image of their web site that it has authentic information regarding the health care issues of the senior citizens of United State then the target market will automatically move towards the website of Pill Inc. where the company can advertise about Liflex and Forevex. Current news and events is the only other type that more than sixty-five percent of seniors access via the Internet. So Pill Inc. will have to advertise its products Liflex and Forevex through current news sites. Another option available for Pill Inc. is to provide current news through its web site that will help Pill Inc. to develop an online community of target market. In this way Pill Inc. will be able to email to the members of this community regarding the benefits of its products. (Mark, 2000) Pill Inc. may also set a chat room for the members of the community where representatives of Pill Inc. can motivate people to buy their products. Pill Inc. has to give importance to the following points while setting up its web site. In difference with younger people, senior citizens come across more recurrent troubles using the World Wide Web, including complexity finding conked out links, viewing graphics, searching new information, and revisiting sites. So senior citizens are usually enthusiastic and talented to use Internet, they, frequently have more troubles than do their young counterparts. The most frequent techniques will be used to make easy Pill Inc. web search and steering are graphical and text links. Graphical links are as varied as the requirements and creativeness of developers permit. While text links are guarded visually by the nature of the alphabets. Pill Inc. will have to use standards subsist to ensure text links have familiar uniqueness. As they are shown in blue, underscored type, are separated by purpose from other page information, and can be given a color change once accessed to indicate their prior use. These conventions will permit seniors to search and steer the website of Pill Inc. with a lot more ease. Location of different sections on Pill Inc. website will effect exacerbate in senior citizens. Since of age-related decline in peripheral insight and contrast compassion, targets positioned away from central visualization are less likely to be developed. Furthermore, age differentiations in search are maximum when targets are accessible at an unknown location. (Dale, 2003) So Pill Inc. should anticipate that senior citizens would find search more challenging when target links are placed in non-central positions that are far from their attention focus. Pill Inc. can render search uncomplicated by varying the amount of non-target information in which the targets are entrenched. Pill Inc. in the above mentioned ways would access to its online target market of seniors of America. Pill Inc. will easily achieve its target sales to generate desired amount of profits. References Dale R. Wilson, (2003), The Use Of An Online Commercial Database As A Source Of Competitive Advantage For Developing Marketing Strategies And Tactics. Competitiveness Review, Vol. 13 Issue 1. Edieal J. Pinker, Abraham Seidmann, Yaniv Vakrat, (Nov 2003), Managing Online Auctions: Current Business and Research Issues. Management Science, Vol. 49 Issue 11, p1457-1484. Kaufman, (09/20/99), Retailers Must Tailor Marketing To Online Shoppers, Fairfield County Business Journal, 08989818, Vol. 38, Issue 38. Mark, Hadley, (02/25/2000), Marketing Products Online Can Change Consumer Opinions, Business Journal (Central New York), 10503005, Vol. 14, Issue 8. Steve Gaynes, (10/05/98), Many Adventures In The E-Trade In The Online Era Of Marketing, Fairfield County Business Journal, 08989818, Vol. 37, Issue 40. Appendices Title: MANY ADVENTURES IN THE E-TRADE IN THE ONLINE ERA OF MARKETING ,  By: Gaynes, Steve, Fairfield County Business Journal, 08989818, 10/05/98, Vol. 37, Issue 40 As we approach the new millennium, computers have become an everyday part of our lives at home and at work, and going online has become a daily habit across many demographic lines. This new trend has also created success stories for retail companies with the vision to take advantage of it by selling their products. And many companies are indeed finding profitability by selling their products and services over the Internet. Statistics show that out of the 41.5 million U.S. adults who were online in 1997 alone, 27 percent purchased more than $3 billion in products. It is projected that online user numbers will grow to more than 51.7 million by the end of 1998, and to $34.7 billion in sales by 2002. These numbers point toward future marketing opportunities of tremendous proportions for online retail companies. Whether a company is expanding or just beginning, this exploding virtual market is fast becoming the prime location for the promotion and sale of goods and services. But the rules of the Internet arent any different than the rules of the street. If a company wants to succeed in marketing its product over the Internet, it remains essential that its efforts be focused in the fight direction. lts not enough for a retailer to simply create a Web site and hope that people stop by for a virtual shopping spree. It is most critical that these online wizards develop a plan to put their name in front of their target market, whoever that may be. Companies are sprouting up on the Internet everyday, selling their wares in virtual stores in what has become known as the "e-commerce" marketplace. Others have modified their customer base by adding online sites that sell their products. Retail giants like Barnesandnoble.com and Clinique.com have discovered that online marketing has given them a whole new vehicle to reach customers. One effective, but still little-known method of online marketing that some companies are beginning to use is the affiliate network. These marketing-based networks provide a cost-effective method for increasing sales, and have fast become the new phenomenon in e-commerce. Affiliate networks operate on the concept of selling a product in the proper place--in context. This is accomplished by setting up virtual storefronts at other high-profile affiliate Web sites. An affiliate provider--the company that sets up the network--displays merchandise directly on the affiliate Web sites, transmitting the sales transactions back to the retailer via the Internet. In effect, the affiliate network is like a team of sales representatives, in the form of Web sites, that offer specific products to specific people. For instance, if Barnes & Noble were selling books on gardening, they could have a gardening Web site as an affiliate. The gardening site would attract those Internet users who are interested in gardening, and the users would then be able to buy a book on the subject. The Web site provides an endorsement of the product, making the buyers more inclined to click-through to the point-of-sale on the booksellers site. This virtual sales force is destined for success, and it is expected that online retailers will see more than half of all their sales result from distributed selling by the year 2000. Another key to effective online marketing is getting the support of experienced marketing professionals who can play a strong part in the e-commerce game. This partnership is essential if a retailer is to succeed. A firm with a strong background in e-commerce will ensure that your company has a marketing plan with objectives. Along with getting your Web site up and running, this marketing communications firm can help retail marketers determine the strategies and tactics that will best reach your target market. This up-front planning effort will focus an e-retail companys efforts in the fight areas and optimize the costs that such a venture will incur. Clearly, e-commerce has a bright future in retail. The success stories written will be those about companies that plan their efforts carefully, using the proper combination of branding, targeting, publicity, education and traditional but innovative marketing tools. In the congested world of e-commerce, its going to be the aggressive marketers who cut through the clutter and drive more traffic to their sites. Title: MARKETING PRODUCTS ONLINE CAN CHANGE CONSUMER OPINIONS ,  By: Hadley, Mark, Business Journal (Central New York), 10503005, 02/25/2000, Vol. 14, Issue 8 Six or seven years ago, technophiles were beginning to talk about the possibilities of the World Wide Web and its potential to make the Internet a much more useful and friendly place. Five years ago, forward-thinking marketers and others were beginning to see the business potential of the Web. Today, we have enough experience with it--with its capabilities, its limitations, its possibilities--that we can begin to understand what it has brought us and what it still promises. Four years ago, The Business Journal looked ahead at what might be for the Web. Today, we look again--this time from a purely marketing perspective. In some industries, the Web has opened up whole new business models. Who would have dreamed of Amazon.com a decade ago? It has allowed industry, customer, and market segments to be sliced and diced into finer and finer pieces--with each of those pieces being an economically viable market for someone. Pia Cryztal, Internet services director for Ithacas Garrity Communications, says, "In the past, the Web could be seen as an electronic luxury for a business, but that has really changed today. Unless a business is going to be marginalized, the Web has to be an integral part of the entire marketing strategy." And as Trisha Torrey, interactive services director at Eric Mower and Associates, observes, the Web has shifted the balance of power, in both consumer and business-to-business relationships in many cases. "The consumer or customer holds the power because his options are no longer as limited by geography as they have been in the past. And that applies to everything from paperclips to industrial supplies and machines," Torrey says. Decisions are made on the basis of quality, price, customer service, and speed, according to Torrey. Quality may not be directly affected by the Web, but all the other key factors are. Buyers can draw on many sources of information about pricing for particular products and services without sifting through mountains of paper catalogs and reference materials. Companies can fine-tune customer service, putting capabilities in customers hands that were only a dream in the past. And they can do that without substantially increasing their work force to support it, she says. Speed has been turbocharged in many businesses, with orders arriving within seconds of their posting, and with order turnaround shrunk to mere minutes in many cases. For the marketer, says Cryztal, the Web has yielded a bounty of information--information about competitors, market demographics, customers, customer habits, and much more. "We can use cookies and other tracking technologies to follow patterns of hits on a Web site. We can track traffic volumes," Cryztal says, adding, however, that tracking the volume of hits can be misleading. "Some services, such as AOL, will download frequently requested sites such as Disney.com to a proxy server so that they can manage traffic and avoid channel-clogging, and for security reasons as we!!. This kind of setup can yield skewed readings when one is tracking hits. For example, the AOL proxy may download the site once from the Disney source and then distribute it to multiple AOL users as they request it. While 5, 10, or 20+ users may have viewed the site, tracking will only show one hit, the AOL proxy server." "The changes and refinement in how we use the Web are just beginning," says Cryztal. "There are a number of factors that are coming together now that are likely to unleash a lot of pent-up demand. Some companies have been holding back on rolling out powerful new Web sites because there are still a lot of people using computers that dont have the capability to run the programs. And there have been bandwidth issues. Too much data and too many features on a site slow down the process for the user. We are seeing a convergence of factors that is going to propel rapid and major changes online," she predicts. Scott Russell, executive vice president of MRA Group, notes that the Web has changed communications between customers and suppliers. "There is a lot more dialog between companies and their customers now," he notes. "And because of that, we have to be much more aware of what and how we are communicating because that has an immediate impact on the customers awareness and perception of a brand or product." The Web has also made buyers of all stripes much more brand-savvy and "much more jaded," Russell notes. That is because they are armed with a great deal more information than they had in the past. The Web is becoming increasingly powerful in shaping brand and product identity, notes Garritys Cryztal. She cites a 1999 survey by Cyber Dialogue, which reported that 42 percent of online adults have changed their opinions of certain brands based on either information or experience they have had online. The industry most affected by perception shifts has been the automobile industry, Cryztal reports. According to Cyber Dialogues survey, 41 percent of those whose perceptions have changed said that it was their view of automobile brands that shifted. Twenty-nine percent said they changed their views of particular airlines. Other key areas affected, Cryztal says, are investment companies and household items. But far beyond customer-company relationships, Russell observes, the Webs impact is running much deeper and broader in many companies. "It is having an operational impact. When you develop a true e-commerce site, you have to think about what kind of inventory levels you will need to serve online buyers; then there are the fulfillment and staffing issues," he says. John Hoeschele, vice president of marketing for bestroute.com, a Syracuse-based startup planning to supply hard-to-find items for construction and manufacturing applications, says that his company could not have existed five years ago. "It all depends on the Web. The Web is our product," he says. What bestroute is doing, Hoeschele says, is taking those items, such as electrical equipment, wiring for voice and data, and supplying them through one source. "In the past, a builder or specifying architect would have had to pore through a lot of catalogs and make a lot of phone calls to locate these kinds of things because there was not enough demand for anyone locally to stock them. And that is the way it is nationwide, because the distributors have to be concerned about inventory turns, and if they are just serving a certain geographic area, there wont be enough demand to justify their stocking them," he says. The same is true for a segment of Liverpools B.G. Sulzle division of the Marmon Group. The surgical-needle manufacturer supplies custom needles to medical professionals all over the world, and while it is supplying custom needles, reports vice president David Eilers, it often has overstock. Until last year, Sulzle did not have an efficient way to reduce its overstock, says Eilers. As the company began evaluating its Web strategy after its purchase by Marmon, it was clear that customer service had to be a key driver in the new strategy. "Because of the diversity of our customer base--more than 50 percent of our sales are to overseas customers--we needed customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he says. Part of that customer service was helping key customers in foreign markets. And some of those customers, Eilers explains, were bidding on contracts to supply their national governments with needles for their hospitals. "Giving those companies the ability to quote a reasonable price and to be able to promise a 48-hour turnaround provided them with a significant advantage in winning the governments business," Eilers says. "In the past, when someone wanted to know what we had in overstock, it meant sending them a 40-page fax, with them having to sift through it to find the needles that they needed." What Sulzle did was create an extranet linked to its primary Web site. "It is linked to their customer number and they get access to it via a personal identification number. That way they can have current information that will help them find what they need online and then order it and have the supply in their hands within 48 hours," Eilers explains. The kinds of changes that bestroute and Sulzle demonstrate, however, are only the beginning, according to Garritys Cryztal. "We are going to see so many things happening so fast over the next few years that it is going to be like that commercial for EDS during the Superbowl--the one with the cowboys herding cats--only in this case, there are going to be some bobcats, tigers, and lions in the mix." PHOTO (COLOR): Brad Remington, interactive producer (left), Donna Longo, interactive designer (center), and Ed Rodriguez, interactive developer (right) from the MRA Group, discuss the development of a clients Web site. The Syracuse-based firm is one of many that have incorporated an Internet development team to tackle the increasing business needs of e-commerce and Web marketing. Title: RETAILERS MUST TAILOR MARKETING TO ONLINE SHOPPERS ,  By: Kaufman, Fairfield County Business Journal, 08989818, 09/20/99, Vol. 38, Issue 38 The Internet has become a haven for research, entertainment, news, information, mailing lists and, of course, shopping. For many users, e-commerce is more convenient than going to shopping malls, especially during the holiday season. According to Triad Commerce Group L.L.C., an Internet marketing agency that publishes the online e-Commerce Times, consume spend more than $4 billion shopping online. Whos buying what? The mature market represents the greatest surge in computer buying and Internet education. Louise Cooper, vice president of marketing for brandsforless.com, said this group is checking investments and news and becoming educated about the information superhighway. They have more time and are using it wisely. What are seniors buying? According to Greenfield Online, a Westport-based internet consumer research company, 43 percent buy software and books, 24 percent purchase hardware, 29 percent buy CDs and 19 percent buy clothing. Greenfield Online conducted a study of 1 million research participants nationwide. From the 2,598 responses, Greenfield concluded that of those 55 and older, 92 percent have window shopped and 78 percent have purchased something via the Internet. These numbers are higher than those for the rest of online shoppers. Though brandsforless.com sells everything from car accessories to clothing to cat food, its most popular items are books, CDs, videos, computers and software. Teen scene Cooper expects that, after the holidays, teens will be the target of marketers and entertainers on the Interne. There are already a slew of teen-oriented sites, and mall-type stores. Security remains a prevalent issue for consumers and businesses, alike. Concerns about releasing credit card and other personal information has prevented many people from making online purchases. However, Cooper cited reports that say credit card numbers are at the same risk whether they are being posted on the Internet or given to a catalog telephone representative. Staking a claim Todd Simon, senior vice president and part-owner of Omaha, Neb.-based Omaha Steaks, said customers prefer to shop in an established channel. However, be said, some may alter their habits based on use. For instance, if a customer wants a steak for dinner, the store is the most appropriate source for the product. If, however, that person wants to send a gift, the Internet is a good choice. Simon said the Internet is also a communication channel through which every customer should have access to resources. Companies which provide such information will have a competitive advantage. Revenues for the five Omaha Steaks companies and 55 stores were $250 million in 1998. When it launched its e-commerce business in 1991, online revenues were less than 1 percent of sales. When e-commerce really took off for the company in 1995, revenues grew significantly. Each year, sales have doubled to tripled. This year, e-commerce sales will approach at least 10 percent of total sales. Whats the law? Another area that e-commerce is affecting is the legal industry. New York City-based Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner L.L.P. specializes in technical and intellectual property law. Started in 1979, the company now deals with Internet-related cases, because "it was a natural progression from our roots" said partner Jeffrey Neuburger. E-commerce is the latest trend in his area of law, and the firm represents a number of companies dealing with business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer related issues. Neuburger sees privacy as a big issue in many of the firms cases. "People shouldnt do anything over the Internet that would embarrass them if it were published," he said. Most valuable to marketers is medical information as well as financial transactions, he said. "Laws are being made to protect people, and case decisions (are) emerging that will ultimately help people" he said, adding users should still use common sense. "If youre going to go to a pornography site, someone can track, sell or match up an e-mail address. Read More