Paul F. Nunes

Carrying your long tail: Delighting your consumers and managing your operations

The growing ability to sell a wider range of goods, in smaller quantities, while still making a profit, is now widely called a long tail strategy. Profiting from greater product diversity represents a real change in optimal business strategy, which is based on real changes in customer behavior. Many firms want to develop long tail strategies, avoiding competition in mass market fat spots, and harvesting the superior margins available through selling in market sweet spots. Sweet spot offerings resonate with customers, allowing customers to find what they truly want and to avoid compromises; consequently, customers pay more while remaining happier with their purchases, and firms earn more and are more profitable. Evidence from earlier recessions suggests that in an era of excess capacity and pressures on consumers to find the best possible prices, competing through resonance offerings may represent an important source of protected profits. And yet, carrying a long tail and selling into sweet spots requires new skills, both for locating targets of opportunities and for controlling costs.

Seven lessons for building a winning brand in China

Purpose – As Chinese consumers become more affluent, their expectations about what a brand should deliver are rising. To better understand the challenges facing companies that want to establish a brand in China, Accenture surveyed more than a thousand Chinese consumers to learn how they decide what to buy. This paper aims to examine those results.Design/methodology/approach – Accenture conducted 1,022 interviews from China that surveyed consumers of six categories of products and services: automobiles, appliances, consumer packaged goods, financial services, high‐tech products and apparel. Consumers chosen for the China part of the study were generally younger and wealthier than the typical Chinese consumer – a reasonable proxy for the initial target audiences for brands attempting to succeed in China.Findings – Accenture research shows that creating a successful brand in this environment requires a sophisticated understanding of what segments of the Chinese markets value in a brand and a willingness to r...

Carrying Your Long Tail: Hitting the Sweet Spots, Delighting Your Customers, and Controlling Your Costs

The ability to sell a wider range of goods, in smaller quantities, while still making a profit, is now widely called a long tail strategy. Profiting from greater product diversity represents a significant change in optimal business strategy, which in turn is based on important changes in consumer behavior. Many firms want to develop long tail strategies, avoiding competition in mass-market fat spots, and harvesting the superior margins available from sweet spots. Sweet spot offerings resonate with consumers, allowing consumers to find what they truly want and to avoid compromises; consequently, consumers pay more while remaining happier with their purchases, and firms earn more and are more profitable. Evidence from earlier recessions suggests that competing through resonance offerings may represent an important source of protected profits. And yet, carrying a long tail and selling into sweet spots requires new skills, both for locating targets of opportunities and for controlling costs.

Advice through mice: individual and advisor-system differences in online recommendations

Internet advice and recommendations technologies provide innumerable ways for companies to help consumers make choices. However, basic questions about the acceptance and usefulness of online advice remain unanswered. A large web-based survey found differences in use of advice sources and topics, trust and confidence in human versus automated advice and preferences for advice speed and ease of use. Tactics and strategies for web vendor implementation of online advice systems are discussed.

Marketing in electronic commerce

Internet Marketing continues to be a hot topic in electronic commerce. With the demise of click-throughs, the impact of online advertising on brands has surfaced as critical. The proliferation of wireless web technologies points out the need for better study of marketing and promotions over the wireless medium. Our minitrack continues in its second year to highlight some of the most interesting studies done in this area.The paper titled ?A Two-Level Approach to Establishing a Marketing Strategy in the Electronic Marketplace? by Hsiu-Yuan Tsao and Koong H.-C. Lin attempts to identify appropriate marketing strategies for different types of products in e- commerce. By considering two main factors regarding consumer disposition towards online shopping, namely purchase involvement and product information exposure, the authors develop four product categories and two levels of online marketing strategy.The second paper is titled ?The Relevance of Brands in Electronic Commerce? and Ralf E. Strauss, Detlef Schoder, and Judith Gebauer author it. It is an interesting study from Europe that examines the impact of electronic commerce on the importance of brands and consumer behavior online. Brand awareness seems to be more important online than it is offline and a new group of consumers is described, called the ?information seekers.??Corporate Branding in Electronic Markets ? A framework for Business-to-Business Ventures? by Ulrike Geissler and Markus Will focuses on entrepreneurs in electronic commerce. After a discussion of the basic concepts in B2B commerce and the main challenges for success in the e-business world, the authors present a five-dimensional plan for brand building for entrepreneurs in electronic commerce.In their paper ?Developmental Trajectories of Individual WWW Usage: Implications for Electronic Commerce?, the authors Mario Christ, Ramayya Krishnan, Daniel Nagin, Robert Kraut, and Oliver Guenther present a unique clustering method for tracking web usage by individual users. They use longitudinal data from 4 years of web usage they discover the saturation level of web usage and web user profiles.?Modeling Consumer Visit Frequency on the Internet? by Sukekyu Lee, Fred Zufryden, and Xavier Dreze answers two important questions: 1) How to characterize distribution patterns of repeat visits to a web site and 2) How can user demographics and Internet usage affect their number of web site visits. Various models are presented and tested using panel data for over 1000 different web sites.Finally, in ?Predicting Online Purchasing Behavior: Replications and Tests of Competing Models,? Hans van der Heijden, Tibert Verhagen, and Marcel Creemers juxtapose two different models to explain online purchasing intention: a trust oriented model and a web site oriented model. Replicating some earlier studies, the researchers find that a trust-based model appears to explain online purchasing behavior better than the web site oriented model.

Creating a Unique Internet Business

In 1849, someone who wasn’t looking for gold found it near Sutters Mill, in California. It was easy to find — in fact, he tripped over a big nugget.The hopeful hordes who poured into California from the East expected it would be almost that easy for them too. Equipped with simple tools, and no knowledge of mining or geology, they planned to scoop gold nuggets out of the streams or lift gold dust by the spadeful from the soft and giving California landscape. Some very smart people went broke in the gold rush. Mark Twain was one of them. He wrote a hilarious book about his experiences as a ’49er.