Marketing Plan
There is a growing trend in the United States and the world to not have the same
schedule everyday of the week. What used to be called “dinner time” where the family
sat around the table and ate and talked about there day has moved to just another hour in
an already short 24 hour day. This time is spent taking children to some sort of practice.
Parents working late. Maybe a single parent raising children. Both parents working,
children in day care. People do not have time to spend all day cooking mom’s special
spaghetti sauce over a stove all day.
With Rate-it set to accommodate this change in society. Rate-it is proposing to develop a
rating web engine that will help figure out the good and the bad service organizations.
In Phase 0 Rate-it was dreamed up and work has begin
Target Market: Companies that need reviewing done, or review things for a living
Competition:
The competition matrix is defined below. This competition matrix shows the competition
we have if we were to put a restaurant rating web site on-line. However, since our main
product is selling an engine that rate service organizations, all of these websites below
could turn into our customers.
Our competition and possible customers are above in the competition matrix for the
example of the restaurant service industry. Our engine is going to be in direct
competition with their already existing web pages and types of reviewing restaurants.
However, as the competition matrix shows, there are features that only rate-it will have
available.
The competition matrix above needs to change. All other types of review web sites with
their own engine.
Advertising & Distribution:
Beta testing will be done in several different ways. First we will interview
people. Second, we will simulate web use with software. Third we will develop our own
web site which will use our developed engine.
Finding out from the people that are ultimately going to use this is very important. If
people do not like the colors we are using, that needs to be brought to our attention. So,
we will conduct interviews with a wide variety of people and ask questions and opinions
of what they like and dislike about the look and feel of our engine.
Since this is a totally software based product we can do a lot of testing of our product
using simulation. The plan is to write simulation software that will simulate the engine
being used in a real world environment. This way we can learn how the engine handles
more then one review at a time or a million hits in a day. This can help determine what
type of hardware is needed for our customers when they deploy our engine in their
business market. Since we can simulate everything, we can find bugs in a few days
instead of waiting weeks or years for that bug to pop up in a real life application.
Thirdly, we will develop our own rating website using the restaurant industry for our
example. This way we can see how our engine will work in a real life application. This
can be done rather inexpensively to get a web page and server running for testing
purposes. If this web site is a success, then we can later put this in our business model,
however at this time it is just going to be used for development.
Advertising
More to come later
Return of Investment
More to come later