Final Customer Purchasing from an Intermediary of the Product

Acquire Steps: Acquire steps include all activities the customer completes preceding the purchase of the product. These steps include the customer's efforts needed to identify and evaluate Intermediaries and travel to the Intermediary location.

3. Intellectual: Segment customers on the basis of their current knowledge and understanding of the company and its products

A. Knowledge of company and company product

2. Familiarity with specific product

Customer segment does not know product because the product is:
Untried by the segment

Segment is unaware of the product

No. SIC Year Note
1 2096 1992 To sell its cheese snacks, Borden shunned TV and print advertising, instead creating 25,000 cardboard cutouts of an orange fox. It was part of a merchandise display that held 200 sample-size packages of the snacks.
2 5000 2004 Companies like Pampered Chef, a cookware vendor, use in-home parties as their only sales channel. Pure Romance turned to in-home sales because its founder knew that women didn't want to buy sex toys from porn shops. Traditional companies view in-home parties as a way to supplement in-store and catalog sales. The Body Shop started signing on individual distributors and having them throw in-home parties in order to market its soaps and cosmetics. Even publishers like Southern Progress are using the parties to market pottery and glassware, prices ranging between $25-50.
3 5092 2000 As customers search for different sites looking for sales, advertising shows how crowded the market already is. Becoming a standout costs dearly, PETsMART.com and Pets.com appear to have the lead in large part because they have been spending heavily for the limelight. Pets.com's branding campaign centers on a sock puppet that looks like a dog. The company mascot made an appearance at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York as a 36 foot high balloon. It was again featured in a Super Bowl ad that cost the company $2 million. Pets.com is purely a net company.
4 5311 1986 Dayton Hudson is betting more than ever on Santabear by trying to turn it into a national brand: lunch boxes, clothing and wrist watches. Now a hardcover book is available and a televised version of the Santabear story was broadcast nationally.
5 5411 1986 For a time in 1983, a Fiesta store was decorated with a $500K painting by Murillo. "It got us an awful lot of free publicity."
6 5411 1989 Some supermarkets are providing customers with their own electronic coupons, sometimes to boost sales of high-margin items. The coupons come at the checkout stand.
7 5734 1987 Western Computers sent out four week sample subscriptions of the San Francisco Business Times as a promotion.
8 5942 1992 Mystery Library offers the possibility of free books and/or a surprise gift if customers send in a card that happens to have the right code on it. There's no obligation to purchase a book.
9 5942 2004 Booklocker.com sells books by posting sample chapters. It also sends out review copies to specific websites that are most likely to be interested.
10 5961 1995 Eddie Bauer is offering to pay shipping only for new prospects.
11 6021 2002 FleetBoston is rolling out customization features and targeted ads at all of its 3,700 machines, which are located in the Northeast. In the fall, customers who use its online bill-pay program will be able to pay their bills through the ATM. Wells Fargo is already using targeted ads for everything from home-equity loans to overdraft protection on 1,700 of its 6,400 ATMs. First Union has used its ATMs to pitch customers on the benefits of converting their ATM card into a check card, which functions more like a credit card. First Union says that response to targeted ATM ads has been 13% better than direct mail.
12 6141 1999 American Express has released its version of the smart card called Blue. It's a plastic card that can be used for making payments online, while also being used as a conventional credit card for purchasing groceries and making phone calls. Launched in September with an estimated $45 million marketing campaign, Blue is a technological trifecta consisting of a translucent plastic base, a hologram, and the first embedded "smart card" microchip to be widely available in the United States. Demand has been so great that usually closemouthed Amex executives acknowledge receiving more than double the expected number of applications by the end of 1999. Entrepreneurial, cell phone-toting customers rarely attracted to the firm's old-line offerings are behind the overwhelming response to Blue.
13 7200 1994 800-FLOWERS's greatest asset is its impossible-to-forget name.
14 7375 2000 Internet comparison-shopping services, or 'shopping bots,' DealTime.com and mySimon.com, owned by Cnet Networks, have launched intensive marketing and advertising efforts, both on and off the Web, and watched their visitor numbers rise like helium.
15 7375 2001 EarthLink's strategy has been to expand through acquisitions and marketing. Besides buying up mom-and-pop shops in recent years, it has made two larger acquisitions: MindSpring and OneMain.com. It also has relied on direct mail to get software to potential users.

<< Return to Acquire Steps