Using the Internet to Gather Information on Customer Needs - Essay Example

?Marketing Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Question 3 Question 2: 6 Question 3: 8 Question 4: 10 Question 5: 11 Question 6: 13 Works Cited 14 Question 1: The Internet is changing the way some firms gather consumer information. See if you can find a company (provide source) that is using the Internet to gather information on customer needs. What evidence on their site suggests that they are using the information gathered to aid in developing new products? What are the benefits of gathering information on customer needs from the Web? What are the drawbacks? For what kinds of industries might this information be most useful or appropriate? Least useful or appropriate? Your response should be well thought out and insightful. There are many companies in the world which are using the Internet as a medium to expand their business. One of the well renowned companies that is using the Internet to expand its business is Kellogg Company, popularly known as Kellogg’s. The company has its own website to assist its customers and provide the customers with a healthy service. The main vision of the company is to provide its customers with more improved and advanced products. Moreover, the company plans to provide the new products with more nutrition and taste to meet the standard of good quality products. For instance, the company launched products like Frosted Mini-wheat Little Bites, as well as Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, in the month of February 2012. These products were launched in order to satisfy the needs of the customers because it was through customer feedback, which was given on their official website, facilitated the company to bring the products in the market. Through various social networking websites like Facebook, Kellogg’s has also been able to gather information about the customers’ likes and dislikes. In order to gather precise feedbacks from its customers, the company has created customer service feedback option for its customers on its official website. Through this strategy, the company is able to keep in touch with all kinds of customers who use the products of Kellogg’s in different countries. Accordingly, the company has developed various products in order to satisfy the customers, as well as to have strong hold over the market. The company is able to comprehend customers’ preferences towards a particular product. The website helps in taking decisions related to future product expansion strategy for the company. The customer service and feedback system, which is created on the official website, helps the company to gain knowledge about the customer preferences within a very short span of time. Moreover, the company is able to save a substantial amount of costs by doing a thoroughgoing marketing survey in different regions which would enhance the requirement of cost allocation. All together, the company is able to gather information about the product preferences among the consumers from amongst the large population of the entire world through the use of website (Kellogg Co.). On the other hand, there are few drawbacks while seeking to gather valuable customer related information through website as has been done by Kellogg’s. In this process of gathering information, the company generally would be receiving individual feedback and not a group feedback from its customers. This can create certain hindrances for the company regarding the kind of strategy to follow. The company might face difficulty while analyzing the feedback from each and every customer. Different customers will have different feedbacks to provide and the company has to shrewdly decide which strategy to follow and which strategy not to follow. In the long run, the company might face difficulties in devising a single profitable strategy. Moreover, this process might be time consuming for the company. Whereas, when the feedbacks come in a group, the company does not have to spend time in deciding what strategy to follow as one single strategy will give the company to earn a lot of profit. The strategy of gathering customer related information through the Internet will be preferable for those industries that are dealing with products especially mobile phone industry and consumer durables industry. Through this process, the companies will be able to provide their strategies through the websites and make the customers know about their day-to-day service. It will also be easier for the companies to know the customers’ needs and demands. A few of the companies that do not largely make use of websites for their business transactions like chemical industry, plastic industry, transport industry and construction industry might not get much benefit through online consumer information collection. These industries generally perform business-to-business (B2B) dealings, thus they might not need to interact with the customers regarding gaining their feedbacks (Kellogg Co.; Economy Watch). Question 2: EBay is the largest and most successful of all the online auction sites. Visit Ebay and read about how auctions are conducted, how bids are entered, and how sellers are paid. Assume you have an item you would like to sell on Ebay. How should you go about pricing your item to improve the chances of it selling at a good and fair price? Discuss what you have learned and whether or not you would use this method of selling. Your response should be well thought out and insightful. EBay Inc is used by millions of populace all over the world. The company deals with the selling and buying of products through online basis and, moreover, Ebay is the world’s biggest marketplace that works on internet. For instance, if one wishes to sell a second hand mobile phone named Nokia 7210 Supernova, the person has to be very much concerned about the pricing of the particular product. The price of the product has to be reasonable so that buyers show interest in buying the product. Therefore, the selling strategies that can be employed are that the product can be positioned to attract the consumers in such a way so that it is ensured that the product is only available for selling in the Ebay website. The uniqueness of the product can increase the chances of it being sold. Familiarity with the product can ensure that the price is set appropriately and overestimation of a product’s pricing is avoided. Terms and conditions (T&C) for selling needs to be listed precisely, however these should be quite limited in number so that consumers do not avoid purchasing the product due complexity of the T&C (Ebay Inc). It can be said that Ebay provides a platform where the best way regarding buying and selling any kind of product can be created. In this process, there is no need of moving the product from one place to the other physically. The entire procedure depends upon the end user, the computer and simple internet surfing. Ebay does auction with the help of strategies like feedback rating, moreover, these ratings are been given by the users who are the regular customers of Ebay. The auctions of Ebay are done with the help of data sets that are available. On this type of auction, bidding continues for 10 days. The company does their business largely through internet auction. If the product selling has to be done through internet then the process of auctioning a product can be the best possible solution. As the users are given various options for selling their product, thus a market place like Ebay will be the most convenient way of selling a product (Gonzalez, and Hasker; Ebay Inc.). Question 3: Indiana University East Develop a SWOT matrix pertaining to IU East. Based on your SWOT analysis, develop a list of strategies that will guide the college's future. Your response should be well thought out and insightful. SWOT Analysis Strengths: Weaknesses: Indiana University East provides their students with a supportive environment with in excess of 50 academic based programs The faculty makes its students competitive to face any kind of challenges It also gives the students the privilege to study abroad Online program option Accreditation approved by ‘Higher Learning Commission’ Certain weaknesses can be observed in terms of availability of sufficient faculties for certain available courses Generation of adequate funds all the time for carrying out the academic programs Opportunities: Threats: The aim of the university to focus on the students can enable to attract large number of students from both local areas and abroad It can aim to offer in-house training for campus placement which can increase number of placements from the university Threat of online academic courses offered by other institutes in the region Threat related to decline of eminence of teaching provided Source: The Trustees of Indiana University. From the above SWOT matrix, it can be said that Indiana University East has been able to position itself as one of the leading universities. Moreover, to facilitate the future of the college, it can intend to offer its concentration of online academic courses as preference for these courses has increased largely along with its available programs. It can enable attracting a greater number of students in the university. Question 4: What are the pros and cons of having a salesperson perform all three basic tasks, compared to dividing the tasks up among several salespeople? There are essentially three different tasks that a salesperson generally performs such as order processing, creative selling and missionary sales. Firstly, in the stage of ‘order processing’ a sales person has a vision of analyzing customer needs, identifies the basic need of the customers and completes the task within a specific given time. Secondly, in the task of ‘creative selling,’ the sales person uses creative approaches for selling any product. Finally, ‘missionary sales’ allows the salesperson to do business by utilizing the organizational goodwill and to make the customers know about the organization more closely. Nowadays, a salesperson needs to carry out all the three tasks to a certain extent. When a salesperson has all the qualities of carrying the three basic tasks alone then it reduces a lot of cost of the organization. On the other hand, it might be unmanageable for the salesperson while performing the tasks alone. While the organizational profit might increase, the salesperson would not be able to keep in track all the tasks because of the growing market that he/she needs to look after. Moreover, if all the tasks are divided to different salespersons, the organization will always be in a profitable position. It might enable the organization to leverage more output from an employee as the employee will be able to focus and demonstrate creativity in the assigned tasks due to reduced work burden (Boone and Kurtz). Question 5: Based on what you have learned in the course so far, identify each functional area within an organization and how marketing interacts with each function. Give examples and be specific on how it interacts with marketing. In administration function, if the organizational budgets are being summarized and the work of various departments is being done efficiently then an organization will be at a growing position always. The marketing strategies implemented within the organization will also be very much flexible and due to its healthy administration, customers will know about the organization and prefer their products more. For instance, in Nokia, its administrative department is very much well-created and this is the reason that the company is able to establish itself all over the world. Customer service function is also very much important for any organization. It is through customer service that the organization earns profit in the long run. Moreover, customer service helps in knowing the market scenario. Taking this facet into consideration, a company like Dell has incorporated skilled Information Technology (IT) specialists who deal with various customer related problems. Distribution function helps the organization to visualize proper distribution of products in the market. Market scenario gives an idea to the organization which products should be distributed in an adequate quantity. For instance, Nokia has distributed its products equally all over the market and therefore it is gaining immense prestige due to its flexible distribution of products. The financial function is very important like other functions as it helps in analyzing the objectives of the organization. It plays a key role in developing the profits of the organization as well as to make attempts to improve and lower the incurring operational costs. The financial function helps in understanding the cash flow in the market. Depending on the cash flow, the organization decides to either control its finances or to let go its finances. The Human Resource (HR) function helps in recruiting skilled professionals from the market. The organization requires having the best employees within the workforce. A renowned global beauty products organization, Avon has one of the best HR policies as it recruits people specialized in marketing department. Most of the companies are making use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) function. There are various data that are available in the market with the help of ICT function those data are further processed and analyzed through computer generated functions in order to understand the market strategy. The marketing function mainly deals with product, price, promotion and place. These four categories are utilized in most of the organizations in order to increase their profit in the market. Sales function helps in understanding the approximate sales that an organization is making in the market. Sales function provides a view regarding the amount of sales that an organization has achieved through marketing. The production function depends totally on the market demand. The amount of products the market will demand, production will be done accordingly. Computer integrated manufacturing is being used by a few of the industries in order to have computerized production system. The Research and Development (R&D) function is very much connected with the market. The R&D is used to develop as well as conduct research of various products or services in order to make the organization up-to-date with the changes that are taking place in the market (Brittain). Question 6: What experiences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction have you had that are linked to micro-marketing costs? Micro-marketing signifies a process of adaptation of variables related to marketing mix. The strategy which is adopted of customization is pricing is generally occurred due to prevailing competition among the various brands (Montgomery). From the experience, it can be said that micro-marketing strategies at times can cost greater than normal product and price related strategies of an organization. It can result in dissatisfaction in terms of unnecessary increased cost of a certain product. Moreover, customer satisfaction aspect is at times neglected, which creates indifference about a product among the consumers. However, there are certain aspects that can generate satisfaction due to the strategy micro-marketing as the strategy aims to decide on product related cost on the basis of competitors pricing, thus it might result in establishment of affordable price for purchase (McGraw Hill Higher Education). Works Cited Boone, Louis E., and David L. Kurtz. Contemporary Marketing. Cengage Learning, 2012. Print. Lucking-Reiley, David, et al. “Pennies from Ebay: The Determinants of Price in Online Auctions.” The Journal of Industrial Economics, 2007. Web. 26 May 2012. . Ebay Inc. “About Ebay.” About Us, 2012. Web. 26 May 2012. . Gonzalez, Raul, and Kevin Hasker. “An Analysis of Strategic Behavior in Ebay Auctions.” Introduction, 2004. Web. 26 May 2012. . Kellogg Co. “Kellogg Delights Consumers with New Products”. New offerings from Eggo®, Special K® and delicious and nutritious additions to Kellogg's loved cereal lineup, 2012. Web. 26 May 2012. . Brittain, T. “The Main Functional Areas within Business Organizations.” Functional Areas in Business Organisations, 2010. Web. 26 May 26, 2012. Montgomery, Alan L. “Creating Micro-Marketing Pricing Strategies Using Supermarket Scanner Data.” Marketing Science, 2008. Web. 26 May 2012. McGraw Hill Higher Education. “Ethical Marketing in a Consumer Oriented World: Appraisal and Changes.” Web. 26 May 2012. Economy Watch. Manufacturing Industry. 2010. Web. 26 May 2012. The Trustees of Indiana University II. “Indiana University East.” Admission Home, 2012. Web. 26 May 2012. The Trustees of Indiana University I. “About IU East.” Home, 2012. Web. May 26, 2012. Read More