03-10-2012, 03:41 PM
Modeling of International B2B Marketing: Marketing Strategy of Eco-Lab
Modeling of International.pdf (Size: 294.88 KB / Downloads: 31)
Justification of the study
eduNirvana created its first product ‘Economics Lab’ which contains 40 Hours of multimedia based content that provides an innovative, effective, and efficient platform to learn economics in the higher education space. The product was given a global perspective and that made it attractive to the international market also. The current strategy of the company was on aggressive sales for which they were looking into new promising markets. The company was previously successful in getting a faculty contact from a school in Turkey and launching a pilot study there. The initial response regarding the content and concept of the product received from Turkey was a very positive one. The task assigned to me was to further study the opportunities in the international market, and the feasibility of successfully launching the product there. My research would enable the company to narrow down & prioritize the countries where they could sell their product and identify those K-12 schools in these countries which are the prospects.
Significance of the study for the company, students, researcher and other stakeholder.
eduNirvana was able to find a customer in Turkey where the product was launched and a pilot study is in process. But the opportunities in other international markets were unexplored. The results would facilitate eduNirvana to decide upon its entry into international markets. The company would be able to pin down on which countries are to be targeted on the basis of the priority list. Further narrowing down that has been done would enable the company to find out the specific states and specific schools in those states that are to be targeted.
Once an opportunity is identified in an international market, the plan was to contact schools with higher secondary in that country and introduce them to the product. The best way to initiate communication was through sending e-mails to the economics faculty of these schools introducing them to the product. Once a response was received, a meeting would be scheduled in which a complete product demonstration would be given over Skype.
The whole project gave me hands on experience on applying the concepts learned in sales management. The sales process that begins with identifying the prospects to initiating the contact was studied and applied across the project. I was also able to study and analyze the educational sector in many countries and how it is different from the educational sector in India. Since the research mainly depended on the secondary data available over the internet, the way in which sales process had to be adjusted from the conventional method were learned and practiced in the project.
Research Methodology
The process of narrowing down the prospects was done in a three-fold manner. The method of prospecting in sales management process that is usually done to find out the prospects from a list of suspects in a particular geographical area, had to be used also to narrow down on the countries and within the countries, the states.
The first level of filtering had to be done at the international level in which the countries to be targeted were prioritized. After the countries to be targeted were decided on the basis of qualifying definition, further filtering and prioritization was done at state levels. The last step was to identify the prospects from the set of all K-12 schools in that particular state in that particular country.
Initially, the target market was broadly defined as the entire international market and the suspects could be any country. From the qualifying definition, the list of prospects were prepared and prioritized in itself. When U.S. was identified as the highest priority, further narrowing down was done at the state level. All the states except Rhode Island were identified as the suspects and had to undergo the qualifying definition to enter the prospects list. The list was then prioritized and K-12 schools in the top 5 states were brought under the suspects list.
Narrowing down the countries
The first thing was to prioritize and target a few countries. The priority should be on the basis of a proper educational system, proper infrastructure in schools and which could have an interest in ‘Economics Lab‘.
The geography-wise video views report on Youtube regarding the views on our demo videos gave a first look on the viewers and their countries. So it was evident that the students from these countries have shown an interest in the product. This was taken as a lead and the countries with most number of visitors for these videos were studied on the basis of educational system, size of the K-12 higher secondary segment, use of English as medium of instruction, enrollment rate, need for good education and internet access. Priorities were assigned on based of this.
Based on the above factors United States was selected to target initially and a study was done on how much the Economics curriculum in US matched to that of the course covered by eduNirvana. A lot of school websites and blogs were analyzed as a part of this. A new point of communication was established between the organization and Michael Kieselbach, who is a professor in economics and whose interest is to share and discuss ways to improve Economic Education‘. This point of contact was helpful to us for understanding the requirements and the current status of economics education in US. Michael gave a very positive feedback regarding the content and its presentation. The recommendation from Michael on the product part was regarding an increase in the content on the assessments part since the assessments were the key factors that schools in US looked for in such products.