January 28th, 2009
Coupons Inc., a digital couponing firm, has acquired the GroceryIQ application for Apple’s iPhone from its publisher Free State Labs. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The GroceryIQ application for the iPhone or iPod Touch comes preloaded with more than 130,000 products found in supermarkets across the US. The technology lets users organize their personal shopping lists by store, aisle and buying history. Coupons Inc. plans to expand the application to be available on other handheld sets including the Google Android phone.
“Over the course of the last year and a half, we have built a very robust mobile couponing service, but we did not have an iPhone application,” said Steven Boal, CEO. “The GroceryIQ application is very robust, and if we were to have designed it in-house, we would have done it the same way.”
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January 28th, 2009
Job-seeker Web site Monster Worldwide has detected a data breach that could potentially affect millions of its users.
The site, which has more than 75 million users worldwide, declined to give specific numbers, but said that users in North America and possibly Western Europe had been put at risk. Hackers accessed information that included names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Monster user IDs, passwords, date of birth, gender and ethnicity. For some Monster users in the US, state of residence information was also put at risk. The company does not collect financial data or Social Security Numbers.
“Immediately upon learning of the breach, we chose to notify all customers and job-seekers and began investigation,” said Nikki Richardson, VP of corporate communications for Monster. “This kind of reaching out to stakeholders will help them better defend themselves against attacks.”
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July 30th, 2008
Most people think of a marketing manager as someone who finds enough customers for the company’s current output. But this view is too limited. Every organization has a desired level of demand for its products. At any point in time, there may be no demand, adequate demand, irregular demand, or too much demand. Marketing managers can be concerned not only with finding and increasing demand but also with changing or even reducing it.
We define marketing management as the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain beneficial exchanges with target buyers for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives.
What philosophy should guide marketing efforts? What weight should be given to the interests of the organization, customers, and society? Very often these interests conflict.
There are five alternative concepts under which organizations conduct their marketing activities: the production, product, selling, marketing, and societal marketing concepts.
The production concept holds that consumers will favor products that are available and highly affordable and that management should therefore focus on improving production and distribution efficiency. This production concept is one of the oldest philosophies guiding sellers.
The production concept is a useful philosophy in two types of situations. The first occurs when the demand for a product exceeds the supply. Here, management should look for ways to increase production. The second situation occurs when the product’s cost is too high and improved productivity is needed to bring it gown. For example, Henry Ford’s whole philosophy was to perfect the production of the Model T so that its cost could be reduced and more people could afford it. He joked about offering people a car of any color as long as it was black. Today, Texas Instruments (TI) follows this philosophy of increased production and lower costs in order to bring down prices. It won a major share of the American hand-calculator market with this philosophy. But when TI used the same strategy in the digital watch market, it failed. Although they were priced low, customers did not find TI’s watches very attractive. In its drive to bring down prices, TI lost sight of something else that its customers wanted – namely, attractive, affordable digital watches. Read the rest of this entry…