Saturday, 5 December 2015

Assignment 2

FULL NAME: HE XINQI
CLASS NUMBER: L42
PERSONAL EMAIL: HXQ0624@gmail.com




Question: Discuss how ICTs (information and communication technologies) have changed the nature of marketing activities. Explain what are the new challenges faced in marketing in the digital economy. Justify your argument theoretically.


The information and communication technologies through the e-market to change the nature of marketing value. Marketing is the process of communicating, which is means that traditionally via personal selling, billboard, advertisement, TV clips, exhibition and S-mail. Nowadays, we are using both traditional and new online Medias. And ICT also convincing the positive values of a product or a service to target customers, the positive value is means that a product has a good quality and acceptable price, and there have a place, like retailers, to get it. And there have some effectiveness factors to influence e-Media, such as interactivity, Intelligence, Individualism, Integration, Industry restructuring, Independence of location.  The interactive is a key characteristic of the internet. Instead of a company simply pushing a message to a customer, and customers can now interact with companies online by seeking out information themselves, this is a distinction between traditional and new e-Media. Intelligence is the internet and other new media facilities new ways of collecting data on customer preferences and perceptions.  No longer do companies have to rely on traditional surveys for their market research, as new media offer new ways to understand market segments in much greater detail. Individualization is to provide customers a greater personalization and customization service. And following by this is integration, the internet enables the integration of various marketing communication techniques in at least two ways. It complements other marketing channels for product promotion and it facilities customer service. The industry restructuring is forcing marketers to consider how to represent the company’s brand and products among the various intermediaries, such as publish news on internet or TV. And the last one is independence of location, new media increase the reach of companies and their communications, and so companies need to manage their relationships with various local agents are affected by the globalization of marketing efforts, or their can have the first hand new from customers, so that they can based on these feedback or news to improve their services and quality of products.
The traditional way for companies is need to print lots of advertisement on papers, and they do need numbers of people to help them publicity their products. Now, they can through internet to sell their products to customers directly, and this new media help companies to save a lot of transaction cost for intermediaries than use the traditional ways to sell products.

The new e-Media can help a company to have an effectiveness in profiling their market and help a company to make a decision of this market, so after they make a decision, they can to consider about their brand. Branding is the process of creating and evolving successful brands. Brands should be built around customer segments, not vice versa and brands should be as narrow as possible but still economically feasible. Planning brand extensions on customer needs, not component similar as other products. Companies should facilitate the switching by customers to other brands within the same company. If something catastrophic to the brand, the leader of this company should drop this brand and re-brand their products. Furthermore, a leader of company should consider how the company measures brand equity, because the value of a brand varies dramatically from customer to customer, and the ICT may have an important role to play with a company. A company can base on the internet to build a customer life cycle, and using four Ps, which are place, product, promotion and price to attract customers, so it will form a system which is called customer relationship management.
There have some new challenges faced in marketing in the digital economics, such as viral marketing and profiling. The negative effects of viral marketing is that as with most aspects of marketing, there is a downside to viral marketing as well. For one, it has proved difficult to create successful viral concepts. And someone think this is merely a fad. Also, there is a risk that the brand may be damaged if unsolicited messages run amuck, such as “Three Wolf Moon T-shirt”. Viral marketing is issue of spam, because it is difficult to forecast or measure effectiveness, low entry barrier for all, and viral bad publicity cannot be stopped.
What is more, there is a high cost of integration on OmniChannel retailing, because customers not merely online or offline, so a company needs to cross of online or traditional channels to please demanding customers. To integration of physical retails with e-Media, e-Channel and internet of things need company to spend lots of cost on these things.


In short, e-Media marketing has been changing the world, but company should base on their own situation and to make a right decision to change to suit with the new e-Media marketing.

Thursday, 22 October 2015

Individual Assignment

Ebiz Individual Assignment-1

Full name: He Xinqi(Sn:150311416)
Email: HXQ0624@gmail.com
Class-code: L42
Submitted on: 23/10/2015

Consumers are increasingly buying physical goods online. 
a) Why? (60%)

With the internet and technology development, there have more and more people prefer to shop goods online than go to physical shops. And here are several reasons about why people are increasingly buying physical goods online.

Convenience
As long as there have internet, people can through their electronic products such as mobile phone or laptop to shopping online. To use internet shopping online, there have no time limited for customers, they can surf online shopping website anytime and anywhere, online shopping helps a lot of customers who need to work on daytime and who do not have enough time to go to shopping center to buy physical goods easier and also save a lot of time for them. And online shop always provides delivery services, so that customers no need to carry by themselves, and it also make us life more convenience than before.   

Lower cost
For suppliers, there is easy for them to open an online shop on internet, and online shops help them to save lots of operating cost, such as rent cost of buildings, less salary they need to pay for their employees and less utilities cost.
And for customers, they do not need to drive or take bus to shopping center, online shopping can help them to reduce their travel cost. And customers can get their goods on a cheaper price through online shopping.

Richness of content
Customers can get more than 100 million results when they key in what they want to search on internet, so customers can read some information of a product first, and they can make choice weather they should buy or not after research, so that incase customer’s emotional consuming.

Wide range of choices
And there have lots choices for customers, whenever customer open a good website, there have some relative goods display which is similar to the good that this customer are looking, so that customers can through these link to compare similar good, and it eliminating customers from some unnecessary hassle.

Customization
Today, customers can through website to communicate with sellers directly, and show their wishes to seller and seller will based on their customer’s required to customize personal products for their customer.

MPR
Market process reengineering is an innovation way of re-organizing market process, capitalizing on “spaces of flow”.

Disintermediation
Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries such as distributors or brokers that formerly linked a company to its customers. Before B2C appeared, the traditional structure is that product from manufacture to wholesaler, then from middlemen to retailers and finally to customers. Nowadays, internet can cause disintermediation within the marketplace as an organization’s channel partners such as wholesalers or retailers are bypassed. And internet also can as a new platform with a different purpose are formed to help bring customers and sellers together in a virtual marketplace.  

Re-intermediation
Re-intermediation is the creation of new intermediaries between customers and suppliers providing services such as supplier search and product evaluation. For instants, Zuji as an airline information platform, it shows all the airline companies prices for customers, so that customers could compare tickets prices between different airlines, and customers can buy a ticket at a lower price than they buy from travel agents.



Infomediaries
Infomediaries is relieve information overload, it is a new news platform, such as Trivago. It combines a lot of hotels’ information, like price and place, so that customers can easily go through and find which one is suitable for them.   




b) How can conventional shops respond to such threats? Discuss with relevant examples (40%) (2015)

Since 1999, AliBaba has been became the largest C2C and B2C e-market in China and it total sales revenue were beyond the total of Amazon and eBay in 2012.

And with the emergence of AliBaba and Amazon, these e-business really bring a lot of change to the world and people’s shopping behavior. In the past times, people would like to go to retails or exclusive shop, but with the rise of internet, the macro-environment is changing, people prefer to shop online rather than go to physical shops, so retails and exclusive shops face a lot of competition pressures, they need against with Amazon and AliBaba for example, so how could they respond to such threats?

First of all, these traditional shop need reposition. For many traditional companies, they have brand and stable customers’ resources advantages on offline, so these tradition companies can take these advantages as their online site’s foundation, and through these advantages try to seek complementary advantages between online and offline. And traditional companies also can sell their stocks by online website, they can sell their stocks online at a cheap price, and this action will not affect the image of their offline exclusive shop.

And second one is physical stores can through adjust their structure of product like cosmetic or luxury product which is customers to prefer to buy at physical store than online shop. Otherwise, most of products are inclined to sell glut of inventories or stocks, so physical stores should pay attention to new products update, follow the newest tide of the world, and launch the newest edition than online shop.

Physical stores also need to improve their service, because most of customers are not only seek they can buy anything they want immediately, the experiences when they are shopping also important for them, so that physical stores can prove customization service to their customers, and it will bring customers a different shopping experience, and this is a reason that decide customers whether want to come to this shop next time. Or provide delivery service, and it could make customers feel relax in this shopping experience, because they not need to carry goods by themselves.

And what is more, physical stores should make differentiation marketing time. Physical stores should avoid some special days such as 11.11 or 12.12 these days, because in these days online shops such as Taobao and Jing Dong, they will have a craze discount day, so in these special days customers will focus on shopping in internet and spent less time to go to physical stores. And physical stores can have more discount or promotion in some traditional festivals such as Christmas or Spring Festival.

In total, for those conventional shops, the most useful suggestion is join the big internet party, and combine internet and extranet together, use their brand advantage to attract more customers, and this way will help to respond the pressure from internet shops.









Reference

E-BUSINESS & E-COMMERCE MANAGEMENTChapter 2