The Personalisation of the Whole Business Procedures - Essay Example

How can the Internet and related technologies assist organisations with creating value through personalisation and mass customization? Introduction: There are new methods devised now days to integrate the user creativity and user integrity through innovation and product development systems. The main idea behind is that the most of the users are able to input their own ideas into it so that the product manufacturers and the developers can have a better view about it. This way new ideas are also generated through direct consumer input to develop newer products and throw them into the market. However; these products are designed indirectly by the consumers themselves and they do not have much of a difficulty analysing it and using it at the same time. Trial and error design is also a new tool in this case to check the user adaptability into a certain new product before getting it into the market in a fully fledged style. Normally the outcome is a perfectly designed product that gets appreciation from the users & consumers. The whole concept of mass customisation is that the users customise these products in their own ways. However; it is evident from this approach that if the user is not interested in the customisation of the certain product, then there is no need of customising it and pursuing through it. This essay will explain the relationship between the mass customisation strategies and the personalisation techniques which make up the basis for a customer to analyse the products in their own style and then help the companies make decisions regarding the empowerments and the use of technology. One of the most important and main enabler for the mass customisation is product configuration. This actually empowers the customers to choose among different products by looking through them and feeling them in a way themselves, and making a selection through this process that leads to a successful product development in the market. This in turn influences the customers’ thinking patterns in terms of the product selection and then the right kind of product / item is chosen which brings along greater satisfaction and greater amount of self-motivation for the customers. And, also this way the customer take charge of what they are using by selection process. Personalisation concept was not implemented when it was first proposed almost thirty years back; however it is being applied now after so many years after the advent of IT and internet. Since the companies are using the internet more and more for their betterment and empowering the customers to make partial decisions on their behalves. Personalisation has recently become totally a part of ebusiness, as this concept indicates many things that the theorists and the practitioners would love to know about in the recent business scenario. For some people, this concept is calling some consumer by name and dealing with them on one to one basis and offering him their products and other deals through this global communication network. This gives them a chance to hit the consumer as per their profiles. Personalisation also gets the companies to find out the history and the relationship of the customer with the company by predictive analysis technique. This actually helps he companies to offer the customers the products based on his needs and wants. A lot of money is spent on the personalisation strategy over the internet while there are some considerable differences that occur at the time of personalisation to the products and services in general. Different individuals answer differently on these issues. There is a need to personalise the concept of personalisation over the internet by the academicians especially. This essay will try to cover the B 2 B and the B2 C nature of the personalisation technique on the internet. Discussion: Basically, personalisation and the mass customisation have their own different ways of realisation i.e. online and offline on the internet. And, this factor infact has a very strong impact on the branding technique for the companies. The brands that are sold and communicated will be challenged in the market at a later stage, however, developing individualised offers for the specific customers is the part of this whole game plan that is followed closely to win them and their consents to be loyal. In the branding business it is difficult task to provide every customer its own experience and yet besides that developing a product that fulfills the demands of a whole group of consumers. Because the key concept about the branding says that they are recognised for their non-changing behaviours as they are same for all i.e. for the specific group that they are focusing (Bardaki et.al, 2003). So, in this case, the mass customisation techniques are against the branding techniques, but the brands being standardised ones will give clients the orientation and provide them the security that they wish to obtain from a particular product. Thus in turn provide them with real benefits that they are seeking from that brand in the first place. Brand always depicts a product what its customers are eyeing for in a general sense. And if it is a personal brand then there has to be a good relationship between the customer and the brand itself. Because, from the personal brands, hopes are attached and it has to fulfill the expectations of its customers to make them loyal. Internet and the globalisation have created a competition over many products, as the products are not scarce, the customers are; and the marketing needs to be redefined and broadened into its scope so that customers can be helped in different ways and the business keep running smoothly. This is called the digital age in which the flow of information is all digital and a new paradigm has appeared in the form of internet for the management of the information industries. However the best thing about the information is that it can be readily produced personalised and readily communicated. And this can be done through the internet as more and more people will be able to view it through the network and make use of this information and benefit from it. People get better informed in this way and then in the same case, they have more than a lot of choices to decide from, i.e. which things to buy or not and what choices to make based on the information etc. Thus fulfilling each and every customer’s requirements in one way or the other. However there is a mind shift normally in the operational marketing and the strategic marketing techniques (Howell 2005). It is certain that the use of electronic media i.e. internet raises the chances of productivity in the finance, sales, marketing and customer services of a company and it is directly benefiting the mass customisation and helping the company to grow with regards to the personalisation policy. Industry and company size-specific findings show differing effects of relationships. Business environment is characterised by the emerging business challenges, and to gain the competitive advantage, the companies have to respond to these demands and act accordingly so that they can have an edge in their businesses. These days, the companies have frame worked such a system that the core business is dependent heavily on the customer satisfaction surveys and the customer loyalties are put under highest alert so that businesses can tackle the growing number of reduction in businesses effectively and efficiently (Coner 2003). These days the race of the prices is also according to the business activities marking the personalisation and the mass communication techniques to play a powerful and strategic role towards the betterment of the organisations’ future. At one hand, the customer relationship management has been considered by most of the companies to foster relationships of the companies with the customers on a larger scale and that is helping them grow and gain competitive advantage beyond the reaches and thought processes of the companies (Coner 2003). Furthermore, the potential of IT enabled customer relationship management plays a strategic role in being a competitive weapon for the competitive advantage of the companies. What this tool does is to only support the mass customisation and personalisation. “Rise and development of the e-Business has led to transformation of many traditional markets and born of new ones. Companies have been forced to change themselves to be more customer oriented and turn their mass production strategy to mass customization strategy. In this research we outline the development paths of forty case companies in Finnish metal and electronics industries. Since the late 1990s Customer Releationship Management (CRM) has become a buzzword especially among business practitioners and consultants. Companies have invested or are planning to invest huge amounts to implement CRM strategies, tools and infrastructure in order to win the battle in the increasingly competitive economy. However, many executives are struggling to determine how their enterprises will balance the business value of CRM against its cost to determine CRM return on investment. Our model presented in this paper allows an adequate feasible, theoretically established prospective evaluation for the contribution of a CRM-investment to the value of the firm under cost aspect (Ansari et.al 2003. p. 131-145). Taking a look at the example set by a supermarket: they specially introduce the loyalty cards and hand them over to the customers not only to give them a petty discount, but also to measure the frequency of their visits and study their profiles, hence, getting the customer loyalty out of that method. Similarly, an incident happened in the past when one of the largest supermarkets was going to shut down the Cheese stocks, however the customers’ data showed that the customers buying those cheese items are the ones who profit the store the most so this is the reason that it was kept over there for a reason and it was not discontinued (Howell, 2005) Legal and Ethical Perspective: One analyst that attributed the Company’s actual competence for the new product development to its ability of knowledge creation regarding their customers and competitors and then associating such knowledge with technology was Drucker in 1985. Two examples will be taken into consideration to explain the risk factors and the legal and ethical basis of such argument that was actually designed by Drucker (1985) himself. “Two of the world’s largest insurance companies, Lloyds and Swiss Re, have recommended to other insurance companies to write in exclusion clauses against paying compensation for illnesses caused by non-ionizing radiation exposure. (Swiss Re, 1996; Trower, 2001 p.56). In 2005 a brain tumor case was first time won in the court in the USA against a mobile manufacturer (Khurana, 2008). Several masts have been ordered by the court to be removed in France in 2009 because of possible health risks (Radiation Research Trust, 2009 p.78).” The above events do a great deal of damage not only in terms of the risks in business but also raising the litigation costs of the manufacturers of mobile & the service providers. This is a confusing scenario in terms that it talks about the businesses and the risk factors involved in it. “Business Week (2009) in their story asked “Is Cell-Phone Safety Assured? Or Merely Ignored?’ and pointed out difficulties in balancing long-term risks with benefits of mobile technologies. Similarly, some employers already calculate the sick days of workforce and possible later compensation requirements. This kind of development and health awareness may create new business opportunities. The following companies are utilizing these opportunities. Some of the players in the field also consider themselves as working in the ethical and sustainable business (Csikszentmihalyi, 2004 p.23).” Conclusion: It is now believed that the personalised marketing and mass communication techniques can bring about positive changes in the companies. These techniques were proposed in the past days however they have not yet been utilised now days as they must be in the corporations. Some companies now are applying these techniques but even those are applying them in a very small capacity. One of the most important factors to understand here are that the companies do not understand the importance of this factor very much, which is why they do not use this method inside their organisations. Normally the marketers and the service providers do not speak the same language when they are talking about the personalisation. However, personalised marketing covers the topics of personal marketing, and output of the company. It is however very important to understand here that the personalised marketing and the personalisation techniques are not important in themselves, but they help to create the personalised experience in an organisation. Most importantly, the ROI and investment levels are graded with the help of personalised approach. Normally, what happens in a personalised environment is that the actors in the supply chain management are all taken into consideration and they all play an important role in the benefit of the personalisation of the whole business procedures. References: Allen et.al, 2001, Internet world guide to one-to-one web marketing. New York. John Wiley & Sons Inc. Ansari et.al, 2003, e-customisation. Journal of Marketing research. Pp. 131-145. Bardaki 2003, Mass customisation in marketing: the consumer’s perspective. Journal of Consumer Marketing. Vol. 20. No. 5. Pp. 463-479. Cingil, I., Dogac, A. and Azgin, A. (2000). “A Broader Approach to Personalisation”. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43(8), pp. 136-141. Coner, A 2003, Personallisation & Customisation in finance portals. Journal of American Academy of business. 2(2) pp. 498-504. Chesbrough, H. (2006a) ‘Open Innovation: A Paradigm for Understanding Industrial Innovation’, Chesbrough, H., Vanhaverbeke, W., and West, J. (Eds.) Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. pp.1−34. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK. Chesbrough, H. W. (2006b). Open Business Models How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape (p. 256). Boston (Mass.): Harvard Business School Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2003). Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (p. 244). New York: Viking. Drucker, P. (1985). Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Butterworth-Heinemann: Oxford, UK. Gandhi, O., Lazzi, G., & Furse, C. (1996). Electromagnetic absorption in the human head and neck for mobile telephones at 835 and 1900 MHz. Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Transactions on, 44(10), 1884-1897. Genuis, S. J. (2008). Fielding a current idea: exploring the public health impact of electromagnetic radiation. Public Health, 122(2), 113-24. Gordon, Z. V. (1970). Biological effect of microwaves in occupational hygiene. Israel Program for Scientific Translations; [available from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information, Springfield, Va.]. Godin 1999, Permission Marketing. Simon & Schuster. New York. Howell 2005, Advertisers seek a narrower audience. New Media Age 31.03.05, pp.12. Khurana, V. (2008). Mobile Phone-Brain Tumour Public Health Advisory. A Report. Khurana, V. G., Teo, C., Kundi, M., Hardell, L., & Carlberg, M. (2009). Cell phones and brain tumors: a review including the long-term epidemiologic data. Surgical Neurology. Read More