Daily Archives: January 21, 2012

Business Case

Group 7: Mass Customization Mini Case

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Mass Customization definition: a flexible production system to deliver a product to order that matches the needs of an individual customer or user (Randall, Terweisch and Ulrich, 2003)

Five different principles of user design:

1) Customize the customization process;

  • Different customers have different type of buying behavior, thus we need to serve different customers with different sales techniques (in terms of user friendliness).
  • Types of interface: 1) Parameter based 2) Needs based
  • e.g: Dell website’s different user interfaces

2) Provide starting points;

  • Consumers differ greatly in the extent to which they wish to affect the design of a product.
  • Different starting points: 1) Free form design 2) Combinatoric configuration 3) Starting points
  • e.g: Customatix, Adidas miCoach, NikeID

Continue reading Group 7: Mass Customization Mini Case →

Opinion

Virtual Branding

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Due to the case of UnMe Jeans I started to think about brand placement in virtual worlds, like Second Life and Zwinktopia. And I cannot help to feel some kind of paradox in this ”virtual branding”. Let me explain why.

The reason, in my opinion, that people participate in these virtual worlds, is to forget about their real life for a moment and create their own little fanatsy world. Sometime people feel even better in this virtual world then in their real life. We all know the stories of people who spend hours and hours on Second Life, neglecting friends, family and sometime even their children.

So people participate in virtual worlds to escape their busy and active life. Part of what makes their life so busy is the constant bombardment of brands, and the choices we have to make between brands each day. So it must be pretty nice to enter a world with no brands and advertisments, a world like Second Life for example.

So you see my paradox now? Brands are now longer sticking to the real world, and are entering the virtual worlds! So doesn’t that make the virtual worlds less attractive for people?? Apparantly not, if we look at the graph below we see that the number of virtual worlds (abbreviated VW) is increasing exponentially.

Continue reading Virtual Branding →

Videos

Why marketing through social media is better that marketing through traditional media???

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Inspired by our course on Thursday and after having a discussion with George Panagos..I started looking for info about social media..when I found out the web-site of an agency called “Maximize Social Media”. This agency consists of consultants providing solutions on social media and how your company can establish its presence through them!
I got lost in their web-site for hours and after all I think that, like me, you will find this video really interesting!
It shows in a straight forward way the reasons why applying marketing through social media is better than doing so through traditional media.


In case you would like to learn more from them, I suggest you to visit their web-site!

http://maximizesocialmedia.com/
I hope you will find it amazing..as I did!

Fay Panagopoulou

Articles, Videos

Crowdsourcing, sleazy new word for sleazy old scam.

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As I was reading the articles, the blog and the information that search engines provide on consumer behavior, mass customization and crowdsourcing I came across many reasons for and benefits of putting the consumer in charge of the decision-making-process. We learn how crowdsourcing reduces risk of failure, boosts brand resonance and even creates word-of-mouth. What an amazingly happy world from the firm’s point of view.

And consumers, they are at least just as satisfied. Now they actually get the chance to design what they want, earn money with their hobbies and feel the fulfillment of consuming their own creations.

Just look at this video of Zazzle. Look at the happy faces.

When I almost started believing that everybody in this world is pleased with the hype of crowd sourcing, I came across the following text. I find it very nice to see more than just one angle of the story.

Continue reading Crowdsourcing, sleazy new word for sleazy old scam. →

News

Gamification?

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There was an interesting blog about gamification on the blog website of Delta Lloyd. The idea is to use smartphones in order to make insurances (which is the product that Delta Lloyd sales) more interesting.

They haven’t thought of an idea yet, but they have looked at a website called statefarm.com. In this website you can see that they have built an application for the iPhone to measure your driving skills. This application gives you a score about your acceleration, breaking and cornering skills. Customers get involved and can compete against their friends in order to improve their driving skills.

If companies like Delta Lloyd can implement such apps, customers can get highly involved and the brand equity will increase. In this day and age, everybody has a smartphone and they can all use this application for the sake of fun, but also for the sake of learning.

You can find the blog here, it is written in Dutch.

Shayan Khan