Individual Assignment: Question Three

Find two examples of what you consider to be an effective use of Internet marketing.
For each example, describe what Internet marketing method(s) or technique(s) are used, discuss what you think is the purpose of the marketing campaign (customer acquisition ? customer retention ?), and evaluate which of the following Internet properties the online marketing campaign takes advantage of:

· interactivity or two-way communication

· pull marketing

· personalization or one-to-one

· greater hold on user's interest

· measurable and trackable

Minimum word count: 200 words

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Baby-Kingdom.com was created in May 2002 as a local internet-based company in Hong Kong, aiming to serve the families of infants and young children. The target user of Baby-Kingdom.com can be defined as the 25-40 year of ages, well-educated female with 1-2 children, and a member of middle class family.

Baby-Kingdom.com acts as a mass informative centre to parents for the extensive discussions spanning subjects including preschool, kindergarten, primary and secondary education, special education and educational materials. Not only for the one-way communication platform to push the information to their customer. They also built the channel for providing their customers for own discussion and sharing their views. Thus, customers are willing to publish their thoughts and stories of nurturing of their young kids as a result to obtain other point of views. It totally raised the customer acquisition than other similar website.

Regarding the mass customer base of the website, Baby-Kingdom.com provides the advertorial banner to some business partners that products related to women and baby. These advertorial banners always offer some special discount of some family commodities and products. It functions to attract customers constantly and continuously browsing Baby-Kingdom.com for benefits. It enhanced the customer retention and profitability.

Moreover, Baby-Kingdom.com established their membership system which constantly provides the gathering and seminar for their members. It creates a cyber community for parents chatting, discussing, shopping and spending times together.

(Sourced by the website: www.baby-kingdom.com)

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28car.com is a local internet car and related accessories trading website. It provides a newly and unique platform for the car owner and second-hand car seeker to proceed their transaction.

Firstly, the car owner posts their car information and pictures to the system. The second hand car seeker search for their flavor brand and car model, after they select their flavor car, they leave the message in the system with the contact email or mobile number. Afterward, both parties arrange the time for car testing and price negotiating. If both of them satisfy the offer, the car trade process can be settled.

Not likely other car selling website, 28car.com only provide a free platform for the car owner and seeker for their own transaction without any interference (including car brand, retail price or even commissioning). Thus, it attracts most of the car seller to post their car information on the website. On the other hands, because of the large number of the second hand cars source, it attracts most of the second hand car seeker to search for their flavor car. As a result, it obtains high traffic rates from their website.

Due to the high traffic of the website, it attracts many car related company advertising their products in 28car.com to obtain the business. Eventually, it forms a reputable and high informative car trading online business.

(Sourced by the website: www.28car.com)

Individual Assignment: Question Two

Read this recent job posting for a customer relationship manager (CRM) from JobsDB.

Based on this job description, what would you say are the main responsibilities of a CRM manager? Do any of these responsibilities involve in-depth or hands-on knowledge of information technology? Explain your answer.

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Regarding to the job description, we can summarize the job duties of the customer relationship manager by dividing into the operational CRM and the analytical CRM.

Operational CRM deals with the actual interactions with customers such as sales force automation (SFA), call center and customer support, and marketing automation. It provides supports to “front office” business processes. For example

· Lead the respective affiliates to develop and execute consumer contact strategy

· Work with local affiliates and regional teams to oversee and manage all touch point (including online or offline consumer information) in order to develop a useful consumer database.

· Manage service provider to run programs that delivers the brand CRM strategies and execution of the consumer calendar

· Lead the respective affiliates marketing teams to integrate product marketing activities with consumer lifecycle programs as an integrated consumer calendar.

Analytical CRM that aims to storing, analyzing and applying the knowledge about customers which information output from operational CRM applications. For example

· Work close with regional CRM director and analytics team to calculate the CLV value in order to capture the database and use consumer intelligence for better consumer marketing programs, better resources allocation and better consumer services.

· Monitor key CRM performance metrics (capture rate, 1-time purchase rate, retention rate), response analysis for multi-channel consumer marketing programs.

· Assist to develop and employ new customer research / survey methods to enable brands to obtain key data to aid in decision making.

Actually, all the duties above almost involve knowledge of information technology except some of the management situation.

Individual Assignment: Question One

Evaluate and compare the features, functions, pricing, available editions, technology etc. of any two sources of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

Based on your understanding of ERP, do you believe that a firm should implement enterprise resource planning software when it is a new company, or after it has had time to mature? Explain your answer.

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ERP (enterprise resource planning) system is an integrated system which is supported by a broad set of business software modules and a centralized database in order to collect and manage information across different functional areas in the real-time. Typically, implementing the ERP system requires re-engineering and re-constructing some of the existing business processes of the company for further effectiveness. Moreover, the deployment of an ERP system can involve user-friendly interfaces, maintenance supports, employee retraining, and new work procedures.

Here are two examples of the ERP system service providers.

QAD Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software applications for global manufacturing companies. The Company's solutions provide critical functionality for managing manufacturing resources and operations within and beyond the enterprise. And the software is targeted to 6 main industries: Automotive, Consumer Products, High Technology, Food and Beverage, Industrial Equipment and Life Sciences. QAD systems are available in the following module groups
• QAD Enterprise Financials
• QAD Standard Financials
• QAD Customer Management
• QAD Manufacturing
• QAD Supply Chain
• QAD Service and Support
• QAD Enterprise Asset Management
• QAD Analytics
• QAD Interoperability

(Sourced by the website: www.qad.com)

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Openbravo is established in 2001 and rewarded as an award-winning developer of professional open source solutions for businesses, designed specifically for the SME. It provides the company's web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (PoS) solutions.

Openbravo ERP'’s comprehensive business functionality is implemented on top of the robust Openbravo ERP Platform, which provides an equally strong set of cross-application functionality. The core functionality provided by the platform ensures a consistent and productive end user experience, while also meeting key IT needs in the areas of security and integration. Openbravo ERP supports the following modules and capabilities.
• Master Data Management
• Procurement Management
• Warehouse Management
• Project and Service Management
• Production Management
• Sales Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Financial Management
• Business Intelligence (BI)

(Sourced by the website: www.openbravo.com)

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Comparing with the above two ERP service providers QAD Inc. and Openbravo, the major differences are the costing of the ERP system and capabilities of the supporting modules. As QAD Enterprise Applications is a complete integrated and powerful functional suite of software solutions, the costing is definitely more expensive than Openbravo. However, Openbravo is designed for the SME and small business with their open source characteristic; it is totally not dependant on the solution provider. On the other words, Openbravo is more flexible to customize for suiting their customer need.

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As mentioned before, ERP system is the integrated system which aims to collect and manage information from the entire cooperate. Thus, the factors for the consideration of implementing the ERP system in a company is regarding to the size of the daily flow of the information. On the other words, it depends of the complexity of the company structure but the maturity of the company. For example, if a new shipping company is established, their customer is widely spread all over the world with a huge profitable value. For the purpose of convenience of the customer, they have to setup many service points in different country. For the effectiveness, the ERP system is valuable to implement. However, some of the company which only serve for few local customers; whatever their maturity of their business, ERP system is useless for their business effectiveness.

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