Remember Pets.com? Perhaps you don’t, but you might remember its most visible sp
ID: 3144456 • Letter: R
Question
Remember Pets.com? Perhaps you don’t, but you might remember its most visible spokesthing, the sock puppet masquerading as a dog. Pets.com invested much of its financial resource base in promoting the company on television, via the puppet, in order to build brand recognition and attract customers to its pet product website.
Pets.com folded in November 2000, as the result of too little operating capital. Your task? Using the Internet as an information resource, analyze the demise of Pets.com. You can view the site at various points in its short history through www.archive.org.
a) Describe the company’s apparent business model (for each of the main model elements). How does the site differentiate itself from its competition, both online and offline?
b) Who appears to have been the intended market segment? Provide a profile that contains demographic, psychographic and behavioral descriptors. Justify your profile with logic or references. Was this a wise choice of segments or not?
c) Discuss ways in which the Pets.com site, at various points in its existence, illustrates use of the Internet as a content resource, a channel resource, and a communications resource.
Explanation / Answer
(a)
Pets.com is a classical example of product development failure.
Business model of pets.com
Build it and they will come.
A common error at all levels of business is a tendency to create products and services in a state of isolation and then task the marketing and sales team to "go out and find market"
It will make squillions
Launched in 1998 , pets.com was ccreated to sell pet foods and accessories via the internet. The premise was that you could "buy online and cut out the middleman" and "take advantage of pets.com's strong buying power". But pets.com did no market research before launching.
Here's the product- start marketing now
pets.con's owner spent big in marketing communication and developed a brand around a sock puppet character.
A flawed business model
pets.co. discovered that the demand was not as high as they had estimated .
Pets.con was fail to adhere AIDA model:
Awareness, interest, desire ,action .
(b)
There may be some anomalies but the vast majority of products are developed following an analysis of market.
To identify if there are any needs or problems that people are facing , how important these needs are, how many of these people there are, would they actually pay for something that meets their needs., if any competitor already serving those needs etc. Such segmentation were missing in case of pets.con
(c)
(1) Online purchasing / order placing of pet foods
(2). Sock puppet character
(3) Marketing ads in televisions , social networking sites and communication sites.
(4) major online business module .
Etc.