E-marketing assignment on Olympics Web TV Essay

E-marketing assignment on Olympics Web TV - Essay Example As a new company Olympics Web TV will have strengths with regards to its marketing mix on product, place, promotion, people and physical evidence. From the outset the product will be specifically designed for online delivery and as such the organisation can easily personalise their product to different consumer tastes and also avoid the costly challenges that its multi-delivery competitors faced in migrating their offerings to the Web. This focused-delivery mode will result in huge savings for Olympics Web TV especially in terms of infrastructure needed to operate. Olympics Web TV could use the new computing paradigms such as cloud computing to convert capital expenditure into operating expenditure, and easily scale their offering as and when required thus maximising on investment for product innovation. As an Internet-provisioned product, Olympics Web TV will be cheap to distribute and cost comparatively less to promote in comparison to non-Internet enabled TV products. Finally, online provisioned products have significantly less human resource requirements and less investment in physical evidence. These shall provide Olympics Web TV with huge savings as well. Olympics Web TV weaknesses shall mainly be encountered in its marketing mix under price and processes. The greatest cost for online TV is content licensing. As a new company Olympics Web TV may not have the huge resources required to compete with incumbents in securing the lucrative Olympics licensing rights. Moreover, the incumbents, such as the BBC and ITV, have the advantage of having had previous relationships with several key content providers such as movie rights, International Olympics Committee (IOC), FIFA and so on. Secondly, streaming video has an impact on customer Internet usage and, thus, increases cost of service to the consumer. With regards to processes, online TV has got lower switching costs in comparison to say, cable TV thus Olympics Web TV will have to ensure that its processes operate at optimal efficiency around the clock. As a new player, Olympics Web TV does not own or have access to significant existing infrastructure and this may have a negative impact on i ts processes. In spite of the above weaknesses, there are a number of opportunities that Olympic Web TV could exploit to create sustainable competitive advantages. For starters, the global trend towards increased online video streaming and Internet usage is an emerging market that provides an almost equal and open platform for new and established players to be innovative. Secondly, unlike its competitors, BBC and ITV, Olympics Web TV can easily enter into joint affiliations and partnerships even with both organisations and end up leveraging their content to its advantage. The large industry players are more likely to enter into joint affiliations and partnerships with small organizations than with each other. All said Olympics Web TV must also be wary of the following threats: (1) the impact pirated content has on the video streaming culture; (2) competition from emerging services such as Apple’s iTunes and also from existing video-streaming service providers such as YouTube; and (3) the non-competitive practices of large incumbents with deep pockets. Competitor analysis According to Porter (1998) competitor analysis involves looking at: the competitor’s objectives, competitor’s assumptions, competitor’s strategy and competitor’