DecisionMaps™ also apply to virtual businesses.
While businesses and stores operating solely on the Internet are virtual, their customers are not. Brick & motar principles -- especially marketing principles -- still apply.
Brick & motar stores get most of their sales from customers within "X" miles of the store. Customers of virtual stores can be far away. Analyzing customers of virtual stores is more complex -- and more necessary.
Virtual business executives use DecisionMaps™ to understand their unseen customers; and, use that understanding to meet their customers' needs in a superior way.
Does your company engage in e-commerce? Do you capture and analyze the information available in your sales transactions? Do you analyze your traditional customer database? How much value could you generate by extracting and applying the information buried in your customer database?
The following case example is highly summarized.
Case 900: Understanding Virtual Customers to Sharpen your Website
Problem: How to understand the buying motives of virtual store customers?
Situation: A young entrepreneur selling products on the web wanted to validate his gut feel for who was buying.
DecisionMap™: Conventional, geographic market data were appended to customer data and symbolically represented on a map.
Revealed: The map showed where the customers lived and revealed important information about their likely reasons for buying and about their neighborhoods.
Result: The entrepreneur's gut feel was close. The analysis enabled an even tighter definition of customers. The better understand of customers and their likely buying motives made it easy to apply conventional marketing principles to adjust the website to appeal to like-minded prospects.
Application: Virtual stores eliminate geography as a barrier. No longer are customers limited to stores in their neighborhood; nor, sellers to customers in their neighborhoods.
Internet shoppers are real and live in real places. So, the geographic market and the number of possible geographic (and other) segments have exploded -- making it harder to visualize and understand all the important variables.
Even fledgling virtual companies have data that can be used to improve results. DecisionMaps™ enable management to extract the value hidden in the customer data. What information is hidden in your company databases? How much value could you realize if a DecisionMap™ enabled you to better understand your customers? For help now email the best time and way to contact you.
Copyright © 2002; revised 2017 GAPuzey Consultants. All rights reserved.
DecisionMaps and DecisionMap are service marks of GAPuzey Consultants.
