Posts from — February 2012

I used to read about an interesting news on newspaper when I was taking sky train to school one day, saying how Google’s product “gmail” used information in their customer database, without asking for permission, just absorb what keys words they recently searched and automatically pick up some advertisements in its ad database, deliver to whom just looked up the key word, for example, if i was googling for “cheese burger” this morning, when i open my gmail account in the afternoon, I would be most likely to see this ad on the side bar in my page saying “McDonald’s cheese burger only for 99cents every wednesday for a limited time” or “get a Groupon deal for delicious cheesecake deals in Vancouver”.

So my real question was, how do you know what customers’ values are? and how are you gonna target billions of people online, each with different customer values?

A classmate in my marketing class DongShu has previously mentioned about what “customer value” is in his blog post, here is what he wrote for the definition:

“Customer value”, is the term that most frequently being seen in the marketing text book; just like “Money” in the finance text book. Marketing was not about just making fancy ads and attractive descriptions about the products, it is about managing profitable customer relationships by creating customer value and satisfaction. Apple can be a good example that has become successful by creating customer value.”

So he mentioned about CUSTOMER SATISFACTION which i strongly agree with. It’s such a key factor in any marketing setting, how ever, more important when it is under the Internet setting. Because posting advertisements online is not like handing out posters, a one-way communication, you will never know what people think after you’ve given them your poster and they left.

In the Internet world, feedback and reviews matters a lot! In this way, only if you advertise yourself in an appropriate way, not telling lies, nor exaggerating your excellency, then you will receive positive feedback and reach the goal of SPREADING your idea, and make more people believe in what you say, follow what you been up to.

As for how to screen the right crowd of customers you want to be advertised to, I think I will figure it out as I learn more in both Marketing class and MIS class.