Free «The Decision Facing The Filter» Essay Sample

1. What is the decision facing The Filter?

The Filter has to decide on its long-term strategy discovering alternative and secure sources to ensure, as well as to increase company’s profitability.

2. What factors are important in understanding this decision situation?

The Filter makes a specialty in developing recommendation engine technologies for a given range of customers. The idea and methods used for this purpose have already been proven to succeed while aiming the services at individual consumers only.

The options offered are primarily based on the single history of customer’s purchases and his/her behavior after the shopping is completed. This characteristic feature enables the company to identify the real tastes of customers as the analysis of their behavior continues after the purchase is completed. The reason to consider the postpurchase evaluation an important one lies in the ability to estimate the products’ real use afterwards. As a result, being able to find out the real preferences a customer has, later on, he/she might be getting a completely different recommendation list to choose from.

Having been focused on attracting individual consumers for some time, The Filter eventually realized that this way of doing business failed to be profitable.

That is why the company decided to rely on transferring its emphasis on to the business-to-business approach. The company is currently seeking ways to emphasize the unique characteristic their recommendation engine possesses and promote its use on other than media firms’ websites. They are starting to look into business opportunities among industries other than technology, media and entertainment.

3. What are the alternatives?

One of the alternatives would be while keeping working in the area of already established connections and familiar spheres, move on to promoting its services in satellite, publishing and cable industries, for example. In this case, the deals have to be aimed at businesses, not individuals.

The other alternative would be based on drawing additional attention of clothes’ manufacturers, producers of household appliances, furniture, real estate market, etc., to the services The Filter provides. A considerable risk is hidden behind this option as the company will be facing a new challenge of being able to evaluate this kind of products’ postpurchase behavior.

The third alternative could be based on developing a unique, separate approach to every branch of industry trying to take over the top place in recommendation engine’s sphere. Thus, before approaching any company, a significant amount of work has to be performed on gathering the necessary data. This, of course, can be cost consuming but, in the end, will be more than rewarding. The Filter will know for sure the demands of their prospective customer and will be very specific in the offer knowing what is expected of them. The difficulty of this alternative lies, most likely, in need to adapt to new requirements, which will force finding technological solutions, as well. The approach used in this option should be business-to-business but has to be able to cover any industry, without exceptions.

4. What decision(s) do you recommend?

I recommend to follow the recommendation described as the third alternative above, mainly to focus on:

1. Keeping the existing customers and working on diversifying the range of services available.
2. Putting a high emphasis on developing business-to-business relations.
3. Enhancing marketing research and analysis of its results.
4. Coming up with innovations that could build up a range of strong points the company can be proud of and, as a result, claim to be more efficient in this particular market.

5. What are some ways to implement your recommendations?

Acting company’s management, a marketing research on recommendation engine’s service needs of interesting prospective customers should start performing. After the collection and careful analysis of the results, The Filter has to identify the key market segments that it can provide the services to at the moment, without any delays. It means that the company possesses the necessary technology and has enough experience in the sphere to execute the work successfully.

After several new contracts are concluded, it is the right time to come up with the list of improvements that have to be introduced on both managerial and technological levels. These can include an increase of marketing department staff numbers, elaboration of special personalized mobile applications, and other innovations relevant to this sphere.

It would be worth thinking about founding of a research center within the organization, which could constantly be responsible for all modernizations.

Old customers have not to be left abandoned. The Filter has to work on maintaining good business relations with them always ready to help and sometimes offering either a wider set of services, discounts, and other engaging proposals.

Stories of successfully completed projects should be described and widely promoted.

The geography of enterprises attracted as customers has to grow taking into account not only developed countries but paying some attention to the developing ones.