Market Research Implementation Plan
Introduction
There are many times throughout the product life cycle when an organization may decide to enhance or upgrade one of its products so that it can remain competitive in an ever-changing business world. The changes that the organization decides to make will have a decisive effect on the continued sale of the product. For an organization to successfully make changes that will benefit and appeal to potential customers, it must first conduct extensive market research to pinpoint the changes that will provide the greatest benefit to the sale of the product. Barnes and Noble are in the process of upgrading its version of a tablet, the Nook. Prior to making changes, the management team responsible for identifying the necessary changes must first perform market research and create an implementation plan.
Marketing Research
In an effort to provide multiple avenues for purchase of the Nook, Barnes & Noble reached a deal with Best Buy to become a retail channel for their tablet. The popularity of games caused Barnes & Noble to announce a software update, including a web browser and android-based games. Other
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Tony Astarita, vice president for digital products at Barnes & Noble.com, has stated that the new Nook was built in response to market research and customer feedback. "It's targeted at someone who's a solid reader but someone with Wi-Fi availability at home or outside the home and is not as mobile a traveler or reader as a 3G person," he told PCWorld. Additional features include time-limited lending of books between users on the Nook platform. This also includes software that runs on a number of mobile devices, including Apple’s Ipad "Our strategy is any book, any time, any place," Astarita stated. It also offers complementary access to some 20,000 AT&T wireless hotspots across the country (Mello,
McDaniel, C. & Gates, R. (2006). Marketing research (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
McDaniel, C. & Gates, R. (2006). Marketing Research (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &
When founder and CEO Jeff Bezos studied retailing opportunities on the Internet, he decided on books because there was a broad field of book publishers but too many titles to be carried by a single store. Everyone reads books but has different preferences about what s/he wants to read. Although Jeff Bezos had no previous experience in the book trade, he saw a business opportunity in selling books solely on the Web. He started the company out of his garage in a Seattle suburb, wrapping orders and then delivering them to the post office in the family car. The characteristics of the books retailing industry make it amenable to electronic commerce: a great variety of products and consumer tastes, and tastes which hanker after a lot of information about the products. Moreover, there is room for bringing down margins, i.e. offering customers deep discounts.
Barnes & Noble Inc. reached a deal to sell color tablets made by Samsung Electronics Co. co-branded with the book chain's Nook label. Samsung was co-brand a custom 7-inch tablet for Barnes & Noble (BKS) based on the manufacturer’s Galaxy Tab 4 model and featuring the bookseller’s Nook software. For Samsung, the deal brings the considerable heft of Barnes & Noble’s retail and online sales presence, particularly considering it's for a model the company already makes. The deal fulfills Barnes & Noble's previously stated plan to reduce its heavy investment in the Nook, which has been a financial drain in recent years, allowing the retailer to focus more on its stores and college business.
Amazon has created a massive product base, and offers nearly everything, from mobile phones and tablets, attires for women, men, and also children, gaming consoles, accessories, DVDs, equipment, and Kindle (Venkatraman and Henderson 1998). From the case study, it also mentions about Kindle, which is an e-book reader introduced by Amazon and is the cause of the revolution of switching from hardcopies or papers to digital e-books in the publishing industry. As a result of this successful product, the company later introduced their own tablet, Kindle fire. Amazon persists to develop its product base, where in 2014 it took part in the smartphone industry, announcing its own Fire Phone that was released earlier than Amazon Fire TV which is a set top box system where people can watch numerous channels streaming and it also supports speech instructions when looking for specific channel or videos (Smith and Reinertsen
McDaniel, C., & Gates, R. (2006). Marketing Research (7th ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection database.
Our major target market is the greater Bentonville area and by extension Northwest Arkansas. Since the major industries in the area are retail and service, we will also target people involved in those industries. Children and their parents are also a major target market. Book titles will reflect the make-up of the community and their interests. In addition to best sellers and other major genres, we will also stock titles focusing on leadership and management.
Books are great thing don’t you think? Barnes & Nobles is the number one bookstore in the entire country. It started in 1886. Barnes & Nobles is all over the world. It has supported many events. They have become the number one bookstore in the United States. They sell a variety of books and other products. They have grown a lot over the past 132 years. They have a long history of excellence by serving millions of customers with its wide selection of books.
Kaiser, Tiffany. "DailyTech - L.A. Unified School District IPads to Cost $100 More Per Device." DailyTech - L.A. Unified School District IPads to Cost $100 More Per Device. N.p., 25 Oct. 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.
There are many things that B&N and its book publishers can do to stimulate more business. The best strategy in my opinion would be to make more deals with large companies like Apple and Samsung. These companies are at the height of every competitive market in electronics, from cell-phones to televisions, and hold some of the most loyal customers in the market (Surowiecki, 2013). If B&N wants the Nook to stay in the competition, they have to market their product to be appealing in today’s society. To do this they have to factor in competitive prices, capabilities, and other features that can compete with top sellers. Joining up with larger companies will not only increase exposure, but also put B&N and book publishers on the same platforms as their competitors.
Amazon.com has a number of strengths that can help them compete with other high-tech companies. They currently are one of the largest retailers in the world. This is an extreme advantage for Amazon.com in a number of areas such as marketing, distribution, customer base and supply. With such a large presence in the e-commerce industry, this allows Amazon.com to offer more bottom-line products such as movies, music, and ebooks along with the million of other products. This makes the Kindle an even more attractive device for consumers. Another strength Amazon.com has with their electronic devices is they are able to sell them much cheaper than their competitors. For example the Kindle HDX Fire 8.9 can be purchased new on Amazon.com for around
In addition, Amazon has also given the customer the opportunity to sell goods. The customers have a huge amount of power when researching and choosing products of the thousands of products at the tips of their fingers. Amazon has just about every department of a store you can imagine, from gardening and lawn accessories, to kitchen machinery, to shoes, and to the strongest departments in my opinion, which is the reading and electronics. The book was the very first product and vision behind Amazon as Bezos “narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising [products to be sold via Internet]: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books…”: then deciding to create the worldwide selection and platform to sell literature in print. Little did Bezos realize at the time, that his print literature idea would develop into the foundation of the electronic department. This transformed into varying products and services to be offered to the consumers: from actual devices to purchase, to the Amazon exclusive “Kindle” E-reader and accessories, developing growth into the “Kindle Fire” TV, and the exclusive purchase of “Audible”, which is now an Amazon company audio book
While he was working for D.E. Shaw, Bezos discovered that Internet usage was supposedly growing by 2,300 percent each year. He knew that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and that he had to create a business model taking full advantage of the rapid expansion of the Internet. Bezos decided to sell books because there was no store in existence that could offer a consumer any book they could possibly want. The diversity of books
Moon, B. (n.d.). Sony and Apple Spat Over App Store E-Books May Hit Kindle. Welcome to Portable Electronics at About.com. Retrieved November 7, 2011, from http://portables.about.com/od/ebookreasers/a/Sony-App-Rejection.htm
McDaniel, C., & Gates, R. (2006). Marketing research (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.