E-Business Application :Boo.com
(1600 words)
E-Business Application
Overview
Regarding the strategic marketing practices of Boo.com, the company didn’t consider the factors in the dot-com era that could affect their operation. Even tough the company created an expressive marketing strategy and forecasted the possible revenue and the financial statements are clear, they didn’t answered and reviewed the fundamental questions for modeling the potentiality of the business. Actually, the administrators of Boo.com are too much optimistic regarding the potential of the business. Thus, aside from large overhead cost in launching Boo.com, we may that excessive optimism is the main source of failure of the company.
Cause of Boo.com’s Downfall
Epstein (2005) claims that executives and managers use the information that they glean from financial statements to know how well the company is doing financially as well as information about problem areas so they can make changes to improve the company’s performance. After these review they are now ready to impose several actions to improve the business practices of their firm. However, Boo.com still suffers from downfall due to excessive optimism. Actually, if we reviewed the meaning of optimism, it annotates to a positive view. But something that is excessive might result to some problem.
Excessive optimism is one of the most important biases not only in business that psychologists have recognised. Several researches have shown that a most of the people believe themselves to be more attractive, smarter and more talented than others, and they commonly overrate their future success. Most of us actually suffers from “illusion of control” in which we constantly overstress the amount of control we have over outcomes that are significant to us—even when the results are in fact random or determined by other forces. Actually, in businesses, excessive optimism may result to delay of projects, excessive overhead costs, unstable cash flow and low profits or worst bankruptcy which is evident in the case of Boo.com. These are only some of the problems that a certain business may encounter if their owners, investors, stockholders, managers, or business administrators are too optimistic.
If we are about to compare the business practices of other online company’s such as lastminute.com, egg.com and firebox.com to Boo.com, the former are actually known to the speed of their transactions. Lasminute.com, egg.com and firebox.com focused on the online behaviour of their customer which is in contrast to the focus of Boo.com that is marketing and global expansion. Boo.com’s administrators had a problem regarding bias confirmation. Most of decision theory is normative or prescriptive, i.e. it is concerned with identifying the best decision to take, assuming an ideal decision taker who is fully informed, able to compute with perfect accuracy, and fully rational. However, since it is obvious that people do not typically behave in optimal ways, there is also a related area of study, which is a descriptive or positive discipline, attempting to describe what people will actually do. Furthermore it is possible to relax the assumptions of perfect information, rationality and so forth in various ways, and produce a series of different prescriptions or predictions about behaviour, allowing for further tests of the kind of decision-making that occurs in practice. Even though these decisions making is essential, some flaws still exist especially in making business decision and that is through biased perception. The next section will illustrate the marketing mix of Boo.com.
Boo.com’s Marketing Mix
Product Development
The main products of the Boo.com are fashion clothes designed for gen X which will be distributed worldwide. These products will be available for the customers who want trendy clothes. The products are different in other competition in a way that the company maximizes brand name and quality. However, the company didn’t consider the use of demographics and psychographics in which all needs and demands of target market will be known by the company in order to provide the customers in the utmost time.
Distribution/Place
To be known in the market place, the product was distributed directly to its clients and customers that cause troubles to other retailers of products. Boo.com possessed channel conflicts. As seen in the case, it is very difficult for fashion and sports brand to offer their products through Boo.com. Manufacturers already had a well-established distribution network through large high-street sports and fashion retailers and many smaller retailers. Apparently, Bom.com created was to be known globally by enhancing their marketing approach.
Price
One of the advantages of the company is when it comes to its pricing tactic. Boo.com was actually allowed to offered discounts to their customers which is really an advantage. In order to be known into the market place, the company provides its target market with a competitive cost that corresponds to their high quality products and services. The company gives the customer and client a price that is enough and matches the quality of their products.
Promotion
To promote the company and its product, Boo.com uses advertisements, print advertisements and the concept of e-marketing. These promotion and communication strategy tend to meet the consumers from different places everywhere, especially those target markets or the consumers in the working place. Moreover, since the trend in the market place today is the usage of e-marketing, the company provided a website that any client can access. The use of the Internet is changing high-tech marketing overnight while different industries have been trying to use it as part of their marketing strategy. It does not only reconfigured the way different firms do business and the way the consumers buy goods and services but it also become instrumental in transforming the value chain from manufacturers to retailers to consumers, creating a new retail distribution channel (Donthu and Garcia, 1999). E-marketing is a powerful tool used by different business organizations around the world. It is defined as the process of achieving marketing objectives through the use of electronic communications technology. Smith and Chaffey (2001) have provided a 5Ss’ mnemonic for how the internet can be applied by all business firms for different e-marketing tactics. These 5S’s are selling, serve, speak, save and sizzle.
People
All people that are directly or indirectly involved in the consumption of a product/service are an important part of the Extended Marketing Mix. Knowledge workers, employees, management and consumers often add significant value to the total product or service offering.
Process
As stated, Bom.com uses several of marketing strategies to sell their fashion products (i.e. through TV advertisement, billboards, tours, and internet/e-marketing). E-marketing is also known to be the online marketing strategy utilized by Bom.com whose objective is to be the best company in their field. Thus, the Bom.com created its own website (Bom.com). The main objective of utilizing e-marketing strategy is to keep in touch to different internet users to be able to attract more clients and travellers. All in all, through the website, whether the user is a customer, employee, stockholders, vendors, retailers or end customers, the true strength of e-marketing is acceleration of the business portfolio.
Physical Evidence
The ability and environment in which the service is delivered. Both tangible goods that help to communicate and perform the service, and the intangible experience of existing customers and the ability of the business to relay that customer satisfaction to potential customers.
E-Business Models
Different organizations that go online choose which kind of electronic business model suit their business goals. The most adopted online customer experience which Boo adopted that are now becoming commonplace are as follows:
E-shops: Online shop lets the consumers purchase goods or services over the Internet. It is an e-commerce application used for business-to-business e-commerce or business-to-consumer e-commerce. It is popular because it is fast and easy to use. Another advantage is the consumers have the power to compare and search for better deals over the net.
E-procurement: E-procurement, sometimes referred as supplier exchange, is the business-to-business purchase and sale of supplies and services over the net. It also allows purchase and sale of networking systems like Electronic Data Interchange and Enterprise Resource Planning. Registered users are allowed to use e-procurement web sites to look for buyers or sellers of goods and services.
E-auction: E-auction is also called reverse auction because the role of the buyer and seller are reversed. This tool that is being used in industrial business-to-business procurement aims to drive prices downward. Unlike in traditional auctions, in reverse auction the sellers are the ones competing to obtain business.
Virtual Communities: A virtual community is a group of people that communicate or interact over the net.
Collaboration Platforms: Collaboration platforms allow groups of people to interact and work together for a common business goal. Communication is supported by unified electronic platforms through a variety of devices and channels. The major elements of a collaboration platform today are messaging, team collaboration and real-time collaboration.
Third-party Marketplaces: A third party market place allows sellers to survey their goods alongside with a third party market place’s offerings (i.e. Amazon.com) on a fixed price. The buyers are allowed to give feedbacks regarding the transactions made. If the feedback is negative, the seller’s products may be affected and other buyers may not purchase the product.
Value-chain Service Providers: A virtual value chain is a business model for the information services industry.
Conclusion
Businesses are developing and continuously evolving in order to meet the needs of its customers. With this consideration, businesses should not only view the potentials of a business venture based on innovation and market trend but they should consider the behavior of their customers. Quality of products and services, buying behavior and value of customers should be carefully assessed. Thus, we may say that marketing plans and strategies would be imperfect without paying much concern to the customers.
References:
Epstein, L. (2005) Reading Financial Reports for Dummies, Wiley Publishing Inc., New Jersey.
Donthu, N. & Garcia, A. (1999). The Internet shopper. Journal of Advertising Research, 39 (3), 52-58.
Smith, P.R. & Chaffey, D. (2001). e-Marketing eXcellence: at the heart of E-Business. Oxford, UK: Butterworth Heinemann.