In response to your questions....
Who takes the responsibility for collecting, owning
and distributing this information, the retailers or TIGI/Affinity?
Regarding targeted marketing info, the responsibility is
clearly with Affinity's data base management component.
This is a profit center, since Affinity's programs and
models are proprietary and are a service provided to the product provider (eg. Pennzoil).
Are there sufficient incentives for the consumer to
devote time to register?
That's the whole point of "promotions". Giving people
incentives to 1). purchase the product and 2).sign up
and provide information whether
that's free internet, a chance to win a computer,
tickets or other products.
If the MMC does not have it's own value (product or
service), then what "value" does it have to "drive traffic
to other etailors to reduce the advertising costs"?
It has tremendous value to those other etailors,
who are looking to contain costs while directing
traffic to their respective sites, and retain customers.
As long as a card device w. a promotional model
is "proprietary", other companies can't simply
copy these models without infringing upon intellectual
property rights. Other etailors would have to pay
TIGI for use of those models like they'd pay any other
marketing and advertising agency. Moreover, TIGI
would still be in control of the data base generated for
extrapolation.
This doesn't preclude tigi from having its own
goods and services, since this still could be
a "both/and" situation rather than an either/or one.
Tigi apparantly right now is emphasizing what Affinity
does best....travel.
The key is to negotiate fees for services upfront rather
than counting exclusively upon deferred buy throughs of
product with the only incentive being low cost ie. slim
margins. (The charity profit sharing models w.
kids or whoever doing door to door sales doesn't work
WITHOUT a distributor network. This has always been the
problem. TIGI could have done this IMO without demanding
such high end upfront costs, and through other means.
However, specifically in regards to cd's, tigi imo
lost its window of opportunity through indecision.
Rather than spending all that money on fancy packaging and
mailings, a better return would have been gotten from LL,
for example, with people going into schools and directly
introducing the programs).
.
Anway the models are marketing ones to enhance offline sales
of goods in conjunction with directing traffic to
other sites through General Search, and could work
equally as well IMO driving traffic to AMZn or others,
who could be tied into other promo models w. major
offline consumer goods plus Fortune 500 companies.
Again, I'd repeat TIGI is first and foremost
a marketing company, so I don't think my assessment
is any less timely now than 6 months ago.
z |
