Marketing 3.0 – an idea for Web 2.0 service
Marketing is a process of shaping the relationships between the producer and the consumer. The expectations of customers are taken into consideration, however, the producers and the vendors are the ones who have mass tools for shaping the relationships (advertisements and establishing prices). This is often used excessively to achieve profits at the expense of the consumer.
For a few years, thanks to price comparison services such as Polish Ceneo.pl, the consumers are able to find a shop that sells a chosen product for the lowest price. Thanks to it, they have the possibility to select the best shop irrespective of the marketing actions taken by the vendors. However, the choice of an adequate product is still a problem. There are several main sources of information about the products, however, most of them are based on the information coming from the producer. For example, the product data/specifications found in the Internet shops and taken into consideration in the magazine rankings are provided by manufacturers. Unfortunately, producers often do not give all the data, especially the unfavourable ones. Therefore, the data which the consumer can analyze are incomplete. Sometimes producers give also untrue information, especially when there is a possibility to present them in an ambiguous manner. The customer must select the product on the basis of uncertain and incomplete data.
Customers can support their decisions by reading comments about respective products placed on shops websites. There are also centralised services allowing people to add opinions about products. Polish cokupic.pl is one of such systems. However, the comments are very subjective, they can be written by producers, and in general, we do not know how objective their authors are and what knowledge they have. Customers can also become familiar with the reviews and rankings of products published in magazines. It is a good source of knowledge, although most often the products are described in a cursory way, and the data are out-of-date. People can also make decisions on the basis of choices made by other Internet users thanks to the social shopping services. However, we have to face not only with subjective opinions, but also with choices made according to the criteria, which are most often different and unclear to us.
Below I will present the idea for the Web 2.0 service, thanks to which it could be possible to collect full and objective product specifications (including the ones that are not provided by the manufacturer) as well as other information about any products.
The copies of a given product model are hardly diversified and have strictly specified characteristics. Therefore, determining objective information for them is simpler than for other concepts of natural language. It is just enough to get to it and record it, and it will be available to all the consumers. In order to achieve this, we could build the Web 2.0 service enabling Internet users to collectively determine product properties. The appropriate rules would ensure objectivity of users adding the information. One of them would be the requirement to provide an argument confirming the information in the case of doubts about its correctness. The argument should be provided to eliminate false information. It must be emphasized that the argument will be necessary only in the case if two users do not agree with each other.
The consumer could use this information to make an independent and conscious choice and purchase the product that meets his expectations in the best way. Complete and certain information could also be easily used by a decision support system to automatically evaluate products on the basis of user's preferences. The user could specify the criteria important to him in his profile. For example he can specify the following ones: product price, environmental protection, support for local manufacturers, honesty of a producer and any product quality criteria. The system will use them to find the best products available. The database could also be used to evaluate the products available in a particular shop. After reading the barcode of a product by using an appropriate mobile phone, its display could show the information whether this product meets the user's criteria. We could also imagine an augmented reality system executing analogous operation after recognizing the product by its packaging.
The augmented reality system using the knowledge database to find products meeting an user's criteria. The system marks products in the following way: |
In some ways, the service may be seen as a generalisation of price comparison services for any other product properties. The proposed system could operate in the same business model as the price comparison services. The digit "three" occurs in the concept "Marketing 3.0", since the idea has a lot in common with the Semantic Web (Web 3.0). The details of this idea can be found in the file attached below.
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