Danielle Fowler

Internet community forums: an untapped resource for consumer marketers

Purpose – To explore an emerging area in internet practice that has implication for consumer marketers.Design/methodology/approach – The paper integrates concepts including a range of recently published (1993‐2004) theoretical works and ongoing case developments in internet practice.Findings – Provides information and action approaches to consumer marketers that may increase the success, providing want‐satisfying market offerings. Outlines the market research benefits of monitoring and participating in internet community forums and offers practical suggestions for maximizing their value in the marketing and marketing research. It also provides a series of tactics that consumer marketers may use to maximize the value of internet community forums for their firms.Research limitations/implications – The theoretical concepts that form the foundation of the paper appear to have a significant application to consumer marketing, but have not been tested empirically.Practical implications – Uncovers a previously un...

Online consumer communities and their value to new product developers

Purpose – To explore an emerging area in internet practice that has implications for new product developers.Design/methodology/approach – The paper integrates concepts including a range of recently published (1993‐2004) theoretical works and ongoing case developments in internet practice.Findings – Provides information and action approaches to new product developers that may increase the success and accuracy of resulting new products. Outlines the benefits of monitoring and participating in online consumer communities and offers practical suggestions for maximizing their value in the product development process.Research limitations/implications – The theoretical concepts that form the foundation of the paper appear to have a significant application to the product development process but have not been tested empirically.Practical implications – Uncovers a previously unrecognized source of direct consumer input and cooperation in the design and valuation of new products.Originality/value – This paper descri...

A strategic approach to building online customer loyalty: integrating customer profitability tiers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a strategic framework to managing online loyalty.Design/methodology/approach – The paper integrates concepts including a range of recently published (1993‐2006) theoretical works in consumer loyalty and ongoing case developments in internet practice.Findings – Provides information and action approaches to consumer marketers that may increase the success providing want satisfying market offerings. Outlines the costs and benefits of some online customer loyalty building practices. By integrating the literature supporting lifetime customer value with the literature concerned with generating online customer relationships, it provides a pathway to profitable relationships. It also exposes the unintended problems that some online customer loyalty initiatives may create.Research limitations/implications – The theoretical concepts that form the foundation of the paper appear to have a significant application to consumer marketing but have not been tested empirical...

Technological advancements and social challenges for one-to-one marketing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of advancements in technology on the practice of one to one marketing. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents the results of analysis of reported advancements in information technology, social media, and their effects in identifying consumer preferences and consumer identity. Findings – The proliferation of social media, online communities and mobile communication have generated amounts of consumer data of interest to marketers. Simultaneously, technology to collect and analyze the data have improved greatly. The result is insight into the preferences of individual consumers and the ability to implement one-to-one marketing with unprecedented effectiveness. However, countervailing forces exist that attempt to limit the use of that consumer data. Research limitations/implications – One limitation is the reliance on published sources of technological advances. While the information seems representative of state of the art practiced ...

ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE: PLATFORM FOR A STRATEGIC BUSINESS FOCUS

Early research into EDI stressed the greater speed, efficiencies and cost savings available from electronic document exchange and, despite EDIs cooperative focus, much of this research also described the technology as a competitive weapon for user organisations. Wider experience with EDI suggests, however, that rather than looking for short-term competitive advantages from EDI, it is in the areas of systems integration and business re-engineering that EDI offers its greatest real benefits. This integration enables EDI to support a truly strategic approach to business, offering major comparative advantages to organisations, business groups, industry sectors and trading blocs. The paper develops a model of EDI integration as a series of standard and recurring stages: ! stage 1 involves a PC with EDI software ! stage 2 is sub-divided into two alternatives:• 2(a) involves a link between the PC software and in-house mainframe software • 2(b) moves the EDI software onto the mainframe itself ! stage 3 provides seamless integration between EDI transactions and application software ! stage 4 involves organisational restructuring to use EDI as the enabling platform for a wholly integrated information flow. The paper then considers the case of a major Western Australian public sector organisation which is in the process of making EDI a vehicle for business re-engineering (as in stage 4, above). The paper suggests that, while EDI itself is a comparatively simple technology, the implications of its strategic use as an enabler of major organisational restructure are profound.

Success and Failure Factors for Implementing Effective Agricultural Electronic Markets

Despite the growth of research interest into electronic markets, there is still little information available on the ways in which an electronic market can be successfully developed. This paper reports the development of a set of success and failure factors for electronic markets, specifically those within the electronic livestock and crop marketing area. Literature-based cross-case study analysis is conducted to examine and compare specific cases of agricultural electronic markets and explain why some projects succeeded or failed. The findings of the research project show that a set of success and failure factors can be derived for the development of an electronic market system in the agricultural (particularly the livestock) industry. Further work is needed to establish whether a generic set of success and failure factors can be derived for electronic markets across all industries. This paper was published in the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Electronic Commerce, Bled Slovenia, June 9-11, 1997, pp.187-205.

Affordances of Social Media in Knowledge Sharing in Intra-Organizational Information Technology Projects

This research-in-progress aims to address the complex phenomenon of knowledge sharing within the context of social media. The objective of this paper is to examine how the affordances of social media impact knowledge sharing dynamics in intra-organizational Information Technology (IT) projects. This paper adopts Design Science Research (DSR) as research paradigm and the Technical Action Research (TAR) as validation method. One social media artifact will be designed and investigated within the context of an IT project. The expected contributions of this work will be twofold: (1) The results of this research should add to the literature on empirically tested theory of social media affordances on knowledge sharing dynamics in IT projects; (2) The instantiation of the TAR study will characterize a contribution of the type ‘situated implementation of artifact’. This research should have implications for both the Project Management and Knowledge Management communities. Practitioners should be directly benefited by this work with an in-depth understanding of social media affordances on knowledge sharing dynamics.

A proposed smart-card solution for Australian health services : the problems encountered

This case study describes the experience of a state government health department in evaluating the use of smart card technology to redesign health benefits programs for the disabled in Australia. The social and political context of the system is explained in detail, and the potential benefits and risks accruing to the government, health care intermediaries and the community are examined.

The Need for an Electronic Document Exchange Infrastructure for Supply Chain Management

Established supply chain management techniques such Just-In-Time inventory (JIT), Quick Response (QR) and Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) have proven that re-organising a business’ processes to take advantage of the characteristics of electronic information exchange can yield significant results. IT support for these approaches is critical, and has traditionally focused on the exchange of standardised business documents. As the internet and other proprietary and organisational networks expand, however, organisations are now seizing the opportunity to use this enabling infrastructure to exchange other, more varied, types of information. With this proliferation of document exchange types and mechanisms comes the need for a supporting technological infrastructure, which will facilitate the rapid development of systems which support these supply chain management and business process reengineering initiatives. This paper contains a descriptive exploratory case of a large Australian organisation, which has undergone the process of developing an electronic document exchange (EDE) strategy for supply chain management across all its divisions. We present an initial requirements framework for EDE derived from this case study, covering success and failure constraints, as well as business and functional criteria. The importance of internal application standards is addressed.