Technology Case Studies - Marketing

Car Retailer

In the first of our technology case studies a car retailer uses CD-ROMs to give initial information to customers, enabling the customer to study details in their own time and preferred order. The company is marketing this as a less intimidating way to begin a car purchase enquiry, compared to traditional methods of using sales people.

Travel Agent

The second in our technology case studies involves travel agent has created a web site on the Internet to show holiday details, take bookings and allow potential customers to register their interest in particular types of holiday. They sold the first holiday within three days of setting up the service and now receive as many as 72,000 'visits' from potential customers each week. The extensive site required initial investment and needs continuous resources to keep the information up to date. But it costs much less than reaching the same number of people with brochures.

Design Company

A design company specialising in album cover design for the entertainment industry decided to showcase their album covers by putting them on CD-ROM. For just a few hundred pounds, 100 disks were sent out to prospective clients. The marketing campaign worked - within two months 80% of the companies mailed had made contact with the design company by telephone.

Holiday Company

A ski holiday company uses an interactive CD-ROM to describe its holidays in the USA. It believes that customers are attracted by film clips, sound and graphics about the delights offered by resorts. Producing the CD-ROM was expensive, and it was in addition to traditional brochures, but it has captured the imagination of potential customers and has given them an edge over their competitors.

Collaboration

Competition from lower-quality but cheaper and faster media threatens traditional film production techniques. So a group of competing companies have got together to build and operate a high-speed communications network to move high-quality digital pictures between specialists involved in different stages of the film-making process. The network transmits digitised film and video files quickly and at low running cost. This has led to greater collaboration, reduced costs and opened up new opportunities. The network is now marketed as a unique and competitive advantage. Companies who use the network have also eliminated the need for expensive courier services.