Winning in Smart Marketing

Smart market has three main properties: dynamic, turbulent, and information-rich. It consists of smart products (like computer, internet…), smart competitor (the pioneer of using customer information file), and smart customer (product information is easy to get). Because of widely using of information technology (IT) and internet, both firms and customers are facing a critical issue on different side.

We customers have a lot of information and freedom to make a choice, but we luck the ability to process the information and filter out something what we wanted. On the other hand, firms also want to make a difference with other competitors by providing something what customs want to pay. This process is like a matching between customers and firms. This paper tried to use a matrix to catalog the data of the interaction result between customers and firms. This chart can help firms to find customs needs and provide it to them in advance.

As reading this article I have some thinking, examples, and questions, as shown below.

Thinking
1. Firms want to meet and satisfy what custom need.
2. Comparing to traditional strategies, information-intensive strategies replaced one point trade-off between cost/volume by multi point curve fitting to provide the products. This is quite slimier to long tail theory, and we have more advantage to do this because of high speed computing power.

Examples
1. Yield Management: toy industry. This industry is short lifecycle, easy out of fashion; need to sell out in the end of years. It always has different price strategies to sell in different place and time.
2. Event-Oriented Prospecting: The dormitory of Berkeley doesn’t provide the cable line for access internet but it provides free internet service. But this will make inconvenient to our customers. If I am the guy charge this thing, I will provide a rent service of cable. Because I know the wireless line is hard to connect and not every one will carry cable with computer especial customers.

Questions:
1. I think “price” are also a very valuable factor in the main idea of “convenience” beside “Time”.
2. If everyone has the ability to build this kind of CIF database, what is the next thing need to do in order to make different with your competitors?

The Forbidden Zone of First Class

I will be in university of California, Berkeley (UCB) during next ten days. This will be my third time to go aboard in this year. Previously, I went to Cambodia and Hawaii in March and July, respectively. Most of the trips planed to travel but not this time. The main purpose of this time is study; therefore I will be more serious. Hope I can learn something from this program, classmates (most are managers and just few students)… what ever.

Today I drove the car with my father on the way to the airport. I was happy but not exciting. My role is studies accompany which has some jobs – takes pictures, read the course materials, attends the class, records the voices – the last and the most important is I need to write a final report all about this short program. I haven't said that the name of this short program is "UCB jointed NCTU Executive Program".

It is a long flight from Taipei to San Francisco almost takes 12 hours. Unfortunately, we took Chain Airline that I don’t really like. We seated in the end line of the old 747-400 airplane. The cabin is old style without the individual TV and the seat is small just like ten years ago. It is extremely awful that I can't use my remote control. That means I need to seat in my tiny space for 12 hours. No music, no light, can't read….O my god! I can’t believe. However, the last lucky thing is I am not alone; because there are another three people have this problem, and our seats are connected together. We can complain to the airline stewardess and ask her to solve our problem, at this we deserved to get something to compensate our "lucky".

After taking off for 3 hours, the senior stewardess stopped beside us and took some of four-poor-passengers leaving one by one beside me. I was very curious about why did they need leave with their luggage. After taking three passengers away, the stewardess didn’t show up for a while. At that time I felt very uncomfortable because of I think they must be upgraded by the stewardess. Moreover, I looks so young so nobody will care about me that I also surfed by the bed remote controller.

The "lucky" became a "real" lucky. It is hard to believe that I can enter the forbidden zone of the cabin that my seat upgraded from economy class to first class because of my poor controller of my seat.