Strategies for E-Business Applications
Your strategies must absorb the fact that your customers now perceive the total
collection of ways in which they access your business — whether directly
or through partners, distributors and the like — as a single, blended business
chain that needs to make them successful. And this is what we call a "Customer
Chain."
Introduction
Over the last three or four years, an endless parade of experts has predicted
that the Internet and the World Wide Web will forever change the face of business.
In fact, if you are reading this paper right now, you have probably been affected
by the Web — in your career, your company strategy, or your daily life.
As leaders of corporate strategy responsible for ushering in the Web era for
companies and customers, we are only now on the cusp of figuring out the potential
impact of the Internet for our firms. For the first time, we are beginning to
understand the business and technical strategies that will provide us with sustainable
and substantial competitive advantage.
This white paper explores a set of new perspectives on using the Web for corporate advantage. Specifically, we will explore ways in which your business can develop and implement strategies for building customer relationships that provide your company with sustainable competitive and financial advantage within your emerging online marketplace.
The paper explores three topics:
- What it means to truly compete online
- How to develop superior business strategies that leverage the new market dynamics
- Which technology strategies will deliver the maximum return
We will show why relationship-based marketing, customer lifecycles, and the concept of an integrated customer chain can be used as the foundation for designing and managing your online business strategy.
Competing and Winning Online
Defining the criteria for measuring corporate success on the Web is fairly easy.
In fact, it's largely the same set of measurements that industry has used throughout
the ages: How can the Web substantially increase corporate revenue and revenue
growth, lower the cost of doing business (operations and sales), increase market
share, and allow a business to become more important to its customers? If you
want your business to succeed based on these criteria, we must start with a
deeper look at the dynamics that impact online market behavior.
Challenges
Let's begin by exploring three challenges that businesses face in the age of
the Web: customer management, internal operations, and return on investment.
Customer Management
The Web has quickly ushered in an era of total customer empowerment dramatically
reducing your corporate power to manage, direct and control your marketplace.
Many of your customer segments have benefited from the Web because it has created
a near-perfect market, without many of the time- and distance-related costs
of working with many vendors. The Web allows customers to know almost everything
about their purchases, their vendors, and their competition, and easily pursue
the lowest-cost options. Yet from the vendor perspective, the Web has had a
negative impact on your business position by reducing customer-switching costs,
eroding customer loyalty, and creating further downward pressure on your profits.
To reach these customers, the challenge is to design a strategy that reverses
these trends and injects a sustainable competitive differentiation.
Other customer segments continue to resist the Web as a serious medium for interacting with your business-probably because they believe it to be frustrating, hard to understand and use, and it requires them to work too hard for their answers. Have you ever been asked to fill out a 17-part questionnaire the first time you arrived at a new site, then only to hunt-and-peck through the site trying to find what you want? The challenge here is to design a strategy that can deliver online customer relationships in a valuable, satisfying, and lower-cost experience.
Internal Operations
You have been given the task of developing your business successfully online,
but are probably throttled by your technology operations team's ability to convert
your concepts into initiatives. Your best strategies and plans can be thoroughly
diluted by a broad corporate inability to truly understand, deploy and support
them. Consistently, the issues are:
- Lack of true strategic leadership from your strategic IT systems vendors
- Too many overlapping Internet initiatives taking place in the company at once
- Lack of consistent Web-centric skills across most business units and in IT
- Too many new business-critical Internet disciplines that have be mastered in the short term.
These structural weaknesses negatively impact return on investment, and they compromise the time-to-deployment and time-to-benefit metrics that are so critical to the success of your initiatives. Therefore, you need to make sure to build an appropriate level of insurance into your go-forward plans, and include internal operations leadership in your execution plans.
Return on Investment
The Web changes the rules on how to measure and achieve return on investment.
Achieving real impact online requires you to embrace the new attention-based
dynamics of the Web, and stop competing based on traditional industrial-age
terms. Customer facing Web systems do not pay for themselves by lowering manufacturing
costs or improving employee productivity. Over the next 20 years, the basis
for competition will be your company's ability to get your message through to
your audience, engage their attention, and keep them from being attracted by
your competitors. Now, your return on investment comes through attracting and
retaining your customers' attention.
In this attention-driven economy, the critical calculation in determining online ROI is the "lifetime value of a customer."1 How can we measure lifetime value? What is it right now? And how can your Web strategies positively impact lifetime value in order to provide you with the revenue, cost and marketplace advantages we've discussed?
Roughly, the lifetime value of a customer is the expected cash flow from each online visitor over the lifetime of that relationship. Lifetime value can be calculated in three parts:
- The sum of the expected lifetime revenues of a customer
- The lifetime cost of the customer, including acquisition cost and operating expense
- The operating-cost reduction due to online self-service.
Recently, quite a bit has been written about measuring the lifetime value of a customer, and there are a few noteworthy observations about it as the basis for determining return on investment:
- It is important to focus continually on new customer acquisition, the conversion of new visitors to buyers, and the repeat frequency of existing buyers. The greater each of these values, the greater the lifetime value of a customer.
- As expected, the costs of new customer acquisition are substantial, which suggests that existing customers are responsible for near-term profits, and new customers will only contribute in the future. This simply means that it is not economical to build your business only on first-time buyers, and that a continued online customer relationship is critical to short- and long-term profits.
Business Strategies for the New Online Dynamics
Now that we have explored some of the dynamics and challenges affecting our
ability to succeed online, we will shift the discussion to the strategies that
translate these new rules into success for your business.
The Customer Lifecycle
Success online is first and foremost an interaction challenge, not a transaction
challenge. There are a handful of very successful transaction-oriented businesses
(e.g., dell.com, cisco.com, expedia.com), but most of the first-generation catalog
e-commerce sites have been failures because they employed a "Field of Dreams"
approach. They built it, but nobody came. Why? Because all they offered was
an opportunity to transact, and didn't create digital value for their online
visitors and customers. Instead, a targeted interaction approach similar to
the One-to-One Marketing2 concepts can be much more appropriate and
successful. In effect, establishing successful online interaction is an exercise
in attention management.
Your online visitors' and customers' interaction needs are different online than they are across other medium. While your traditional customer interaction model is task-based (e.g., the need to get the answer to a product problem, or check on the availability of a product on order), the online customer interaction model is needs-based. The difference between them is that task-based relationships are process- and action-oriented, whereas needs-based relationships are fluid, always changing, and interaction-oriented. For example, most online banking relationships are currently configured for task-based models you can check your balance or open an account. By comparison, Intuit has excelled at creating needs-based relationships with its customers, centered around financial portfolio management. Everything from instant stock prices to credit card management to checkbook reprints is available from one spot.
Interactive, needs-based relationships can best be approached by evaluating them as managing a customer lifecycle. The concept of a customer lifecycle is simple your online visitors and customers have different needs, objectives and styles as they progress through their online relationship with your company, and should be treated appropriately at each stage. What's hard is understanding how customer behavior changes across visits, how these changes map to their needs, and what you can do about it. The best way to accommodate the customer lifecycle concept in your marketing strategy is to invert traditional marketing theory.
Simply put, stop running your online business with a product-based marketing strategy. In the age of the Web, the new de facto marketing theory is relationship-based marketing. In the pre-Web days, it was standard to build your relationship based on the product purchase experience, and then develop your relationship with that customer over time. The Web requires you to spin this around. Your online market expects you to service them first, adding value to their exploration while providing them with knowledge-before you try to convert them into paying clientele. What we propose is a dramatic change in your perception of your customers to evaluate the value that your company offers. The new determination of the value you deliver is knowledge-based, not price- or product-based. We call this digital value creation.
The Value of Customer
Share
In the age of the Web, customer share becomes at least as important as market
share, if not more, because only the attraction and retention of your customers'
attention can raise the lifetime value of that customer's contribution to your
top and bottom line. Customer share is about meeting the related or ongoing
needs of your customers, and designing your business to extract a lot out of
each customer, instead of a little out of many customers. You can execute an
online customer lifecycle strategy by building a phased approach around market
share and customer share objectives, based on how much you know about your customers
and the degree to which your product(s) are tailored or standardized.
Let's consider two: General Motors controls the greatest market share of any domestic automobile manufacturer, but in fact has very little customer share. Most people visit their car dealer showroom only once every several years. In the interim, they meet their other car, travel, and lifestyle-related needs through other companies — tires are bought from Goodyear, car washes are purchased at the gas station, travel planning is purchased from a travel agent, etc. Considering the fact that most cars are merchandized on their image, lifestyle impact, the quality of the ride, and safety, it is surprising that General Motors doesn't exploit these issues much further to become the center of their customers' traveling world.
On the other hand, Nike is one of the leaders in managing market share and customer share. Not only is Nike one of the leading sneaker manufacturers in the world, but when you visit the shoe store to purchase sneakers, you are also likely to walk out with a Nike t-shirt, bag, cap, or wallet. In fact, Nike has become the center of the health and athletic world because they manage customer share.
So, in developing the model of your customer's lifecycle, consider both market-share and customer-share objectives, and manage to both. Use market share in the customer-acquisition phase of the lifecycle, and use customer share in the customer-retention phase.
It is important to develop online marketing strategies that consider both customer acquisition and customer retention in your customer relationships. At the beginning of any new online relationship, you know next to nothing about the visitor. Their privacy concerns, along with a trigger-finger frustration level, prevent them from disclosing much about themselves. So, in order to even get to targeted One-to-One marketing, you must first succeed with your visitors on an anonymous basis. You can't yet tailor your products to them, but you can tailor their experiences, which is the beginning of long-term sustainable advantage. In other words, if you can significantly lower the entry barrier to online interaction with your company, you're sure to get more visitors actually completing and succeeding during their first experiences with your business online.
Long-lasting Relationships
As you learn more about your visitors, you can employ One-to-One strategies
for tailoring their experience and your products to their needs. But don't stop
there. Your goal is to establish long-lasting relationships with your customers,
which in effect re-establish switching costs into their lives and reaffirm you
as their preferred vendor. Online loyalty can be instituted regularly by focusing
a portion of your marketing strategies on Many-to-Many. Better described as
"community," this strategy is important for you to establish a sense of place
for your customers, and not treat them as if they each live in solitary confinement.
Your customers are looking for assistance, support and social connection. Provide
them with the forums to get to know and support each other, and you will often
find rapid financial rewards.
You will be able to convert your customer base into contributors, so that your site becomes a living, continually enhanced destination without requiring your company to shoulder an ever-increasing content and editorial production burden. You will find that your customers return more often and more regularly because they have begun building onsite relationships with others that share similar interests, and this "user group" of sorts moves your business forward in many ways. Why does Amazon.com offer discussion groups for almost every book in the store? It's a Many-to-Many strategy that connects their customers together, creates loyalty to the Amazon.com site and reduces the exposure to customer "churn" that they would otherwise suffer at the hands of their lowest-priced or biggest competitor. In effect, Many-to-Many strategies provide your business with subsidized learning about your customers-to your competitive and financial advantages.
Target marketing may take the form of One-to-One or even One-to-Many, depending on the application. A personal computer manufacturer may target both individuals and corporate accounts online. A One-to-One strategy can be very appropriate for helping the individual configure and purchase the computer which best meets their needs. Likewise, building long-lasting relationships with corporate accounts requires targeted versions of the entire site that understand their volume-discount agreements and internal purchasing regulations, such as what products, discounts, and sign off amounts are appropriate. In this later situation, the personalized site may be exposed to thousands of the customer's employees. The value that the PC manufacturer brings to the party is the outsourced management of the PC-purchasing overhead, which in many cases could be half as costly as the PC itself. The PC company is not only targeting their products to the account, but making it easier for the account to do business with them. In this case, the PC manufacturer is focused on their customer's digital value assessment and on the lifetime value of the customer. Thus, the manufacturer is willing to do the extra work because it creates loyalty (and switching costs), increases the quantitative value proposition, and reduces exposure to competitive price commoditization.3
The Customer Chain
Further consideration of relationship-based marketing around the customer lifecycle
can quickly lead you to the conclusion that you have to do more than just provide
a high quality experience across your company's web site. In fact, in the frictionless
world that the Web provides your customers, they are likely to visit at multiple
locations that indirectly touch your company. Therefore, the notion that your
company should be building one monolithic site that drives all eyeballs and
builds all relationships with your market is misguided. Rather than trying to
bring everyone to you, you need to go to where they are, across your entire
customer-facing business chain of distributors, resellers, and partners.
Traditionally, businesses have attended to their markets and customers through highly fragmented business chains. These chains could not be managed as a single integrated system, as suppliers are now managed within an integrated supply chain. Responsibility for managing the whole chain was shrugged off. Each different component such as direct field resources, distributors, and third party support companies was responsible for its individual businesses and deliverables. At best, you might provide these companies with marketing co-op dollars, but the customer interface was their responsibility. In reality, businesses have mostly promoted the value of their specific goods and services to the marketplace, rather than the quality and value of their lifelong customer relationship. Vendors have attempted to mechanize systems in support of the customer-sales force automation (SFA) systems to make our sales efforts more efficient, or lead-tracking systems to manage our demand-generation activities. But vendors have never attacked the entire customer relationship in an integrated, automated fashion, with the aim of improving satisfaction, efficiency, cost or reach.
Click Fig. 1 To Enlarge
Consider the challenges that your distributors and resellers face in their own web-based commerce initiatives. Each is burdened by the same online strategy and technology challenges that your company faces. But unlike you, they have to carry and promote multiple vendor product lines and develop customer relationships in highly commoditized markets. Often they have less sophisticated Web systems and much less funding available to support their initiatives than your firm does. Their lack of resources can keep them from being much less successful than you while having to absorb the burden of managing and selling your products for you. Yet ultimately your online market position is only as good as the collective quality of online presence of your resellers, and as a result your true reach is not nearly as great as you might think it to be.
Unfortunately, your distribution channel's online businesses do not have the luxury that grocers have. Because the reseller's web site is separate and distinct from yours, they must stock their own virtual "shelves" with your products, own the merchandising, get the eyeballs to the site, and so on. If you think that the operational and technical complexity of your site is high, imagine what it takes for your service providers to succeed every day. The result? Your customer chain can be severely compromised, because your customers are not getting the type of new value that they want from you. Your competitive position is reduced because the lifetime value of the customers is not maximized.
Strategies for E-Business Applications
Many Web businesses in the distribution chain suffer from what we call "the
grocer syndrome." Grocers work on very thin profit margins, and are required
to represent many products, maintain large inventories, and focus on maximizing
inventory turns as the only way of squeezing out a few percent of profit. They
rely on their suppliers to manage their own inventory, stock their shelves,
drive merchandising programs, and cooperate in the purchase success of their
products in the store. In fact, the two most valuable assets that the grocer
can offer their suppliers are shelf-space availability and traffic building,
storewide promotions.
In the age of the Web, the customer-facing business chain can be managed as a single integrated system. Taking responsibility and control for the greatest use of this "customer chain" is as powerful for market positions as supply chain management is for manufacturing and production competitiveness.
What is the "Customer Chain"?
Your customer chain consists of every participating division, company and web
site in the delivery of your business online, viewed from your customers' perspective.
The customer chain replaces the traditionally fragmented chain made up of islands
of web sites with a single, continuous chain that integrates multiple web sites
into an intelligent interconnected fabric and offers greater value than your
competition. This confederation of sites shares and exchanges products (i.e.,
content), services (i.e., shipping, billing) and customer knowledge (i.e., profiles)
between them. The proper construction and management of your customer chain
is the key to a truly sustainable online business position.
Taking responsibility for the customer relationship at any point in the customer chain will dramatically increase your ROI (via a much-improved lifetime value calculation). It will also reestablish customer loyalty and broad-based customer management, and provide an operational business framework from which your IT team can operate effectively. You will be present at all the places that your customer interacts with your company, getting you closer to your customers than ever before. You will have faster and better information on their preferences and behaviors, and increase the value that you provide to your distribution channel. You will also increase their costs of switching away from you, and prevent your competition from ever controlling your business category.
Elements of the Customer Chain
Successful customer chains are made up of three layers: the knowledge providers,
the product providers, and the service providers. The chain is a functioning
system when it is brought together under a virtually integrated network, reaching
the most number of customers, in the most valuable ways, in the most locations.
Knowledge providers, product providers and service providers are loosely coupled
together to meet the needs of your customer.4
The Knowledge Provider
Simply put, your knowledge providers give you the electronic content that enables
you to shift from being a product site to serving as a category portal from
being a product-based vendor to one that rewards the customers' attention. Knowledge
providers are the foundation for creating digital value in the minds of your
customers because they help your site better manage customer attention and time.
For example, consider a fictional semiconductor manufacturer. Rather than focusing their site around their products, pricing, specifications, etc.; the manufacturer recruits knowledge providers and syndicates information on everything from the newest ASIC manufacturing technologies to industry trends and new electronic-design strategies. By bringing this content directly to their site, the manufacturer provides customers with a central location that helps them do their jobs better, build better products, make better decisions, and use their attention and time more effectively. No longer just a product supplier, the semiconductor manufacturer has become the center of their customer's world for everything semiconductor-related, increasing their customer's new value assessment of them.
Take note — we are not talking about a simple scheme of occasionally managing hyperlinks that point to other potentially interesting Web sites. Instead, we are talking about the physical harvesting and syndication of knowledge (content) into your site so that it looks, acts and behaves like an integrated part of the online experience that you offer your market.
Where might these knowledge providers be? They can include commercial content providers, industry experts, other complementary vendors with unique information, or even your own customers.
The Product Provider
The product providers in your customer chain are typically you and the other
business units and divisions in your company. Many companies have begun mastering
the art of merchandising their products, or providing self-service customer
support. But, the mistake that most companies make is approaching their online
presence in a stovepipe, task-focused basis. The customer is forced to separately
master the arts of buying from the site and getting support from the site
certainly not a needs-based, customer-centric approach.
Almost every company that has deployed more than one customer-facing web site, whether for servicing different geographies or different customer segments, treats each site as an island. High-technology companies have great difficulty managing their products online across multiple, geographically distributed sites. Banks have sites for retail, sites for investment banking, and sites for corporate finance — but they almost never provide a single customer-centric face that brings all of the right banking products to the customer, allowing them to meet all of their corporate and personal financial needs.
Constructing a superior product-provider layer in your customer chain requires you to think about your business from the customers' perspective. You must deliver a needs-focused experience, for all of their needs, not just for a particular group or a division. This reintroduces the notion of a portal, from a different viewpoint. In this situation, your company may have one, a few, or even many portals into the firm. For example, it is probably appropriate for the bank to have a retail entry and an investment banking entry, because their target customers are so different. But, as each portal begins to learn about each visitor's needs and the management of the customer lifecycle begins, you should be able to depend on a customer-management "backbone" that loosely couples all the portals in your company together into a single intelligent network. Each portal should be able to draw from other groups, and syndicate products of value from them, in order to best meet the customer needs and maximize your customer-share opportunity.
The Service Provider
Service providers are all the online places outside of your primary site in
which your products and services reach your customers. These include your partners,
distributors, field organizations, and other business units, each of whom has
established their own online business extension.
If your business is truly focused on customer relationships, you must include your service providers' web sites in your customer chain. From your customers' perspective, service providers offer multiple online locations through which they can interact and transact with your products and services in order to meet their business or personal needs. In turn, your ability to attract and retain customers is only as good as the sum total of the quality of relationship delivered by all of your online interaction points. Furthermore, your customer expects your business, not just your company, to service them equally well no matter how or from where they approach you. Therefore, it becomes critical that you and your service providers are equally knowledgeable about your customers and that the customer is participating in the same point of their lifecycle, regardless of where they are in your customer chain at a given moment.
Service providers enable your business to "go where the eyeballs are" rather than attempting supernatural acts to get them all back to where you are. Your customers are naturally attracted to service providers because of the value that they deliver. Some service providers establish their value based on utility, such as Federal Express or Amazon.com. Some service providers are valued on the affinity they create: CBS Sportsline.com, CNN News, Reuters. It is likely that your final customers are attracted to a broad range of utility- and affinity-based service providers.
Constructing a superior service provider layer in your customer chain starts with you beginning to think of yourself as an electronic "syndicator" to your service providers. By taking responsibility for the management and delivery of your electronic products-within your own site or remotely at your service providers' site you can remedy the grocer syndrome. Offloading the effort of managing your products allows your service providers to concentrate all of their online energies on building relationships with their (and your) customers. The service provider benefits from products that are always current, properly merchandized and effectively communicated to their customers. In effect, service providers become direct recipients of the investments that you make in your web systems, lowering their cost of operations and increasing their online success rate. Of course, this quickly translates into better customer relationships at each external point in your customer chain, greater service, greater potential for loyalty, and increased lifetime value calculation. In the process, your business has also captured the attention of another customer: your service providers. By focusing on your relationship with them, you have established long-term competitive advantage and switching costs on their behalf because their businesses are dependent on yours in order to succeed.
Remember that the service provider layer has an upstream component as well. In return for the downstream value just discussed, suppose that your service providers agree to give you access to visitor traffic and preference patterns on their Web sites. Take this a bit further, and envision sharing a common customer-profile database, regularly synchronized so that your whole customer chain can better service the customer according to their wants and needs. The longer-term potential is tremendous, and could re-engineer the way you plan, manage, and compete in your markets.
Integrating your service providers into your customer chain will benefit your business in at least two ways:
- Your business will maximize online financial success because you increase the number of reachable customers and the average lifetime value of each customer. As you assist your service providers in delivering your digital value through their portals, you increase the "pull" for your products and services through their online presence. This is referred to as the "downstream potential" of your customer chain.
- You will maximize your own visibility to your customers and market, even when you don't touch them directly. This "upstream" capability empowers you to understand, tune and cooperatively manage your marketplace with your service providers, to everyone's benefit.
The Customer Chain In Action
In part, customer chains are a trend towards the industrialization of Web portals.
Borrowing on the concepts that Yahoo, Excite, SNAP!Online and others have used
to centralize your entry into the Internet, we propose the notion that every
business strive to become a targeted category portal to their customers. It
is possible to receive the same value that Yahoo gets from controlling the retail
entry to the Web: there can be only one "most popular" entry point, and whoever
owns that point unfairly controls access to the customer.
It quickly becomes an accelerating, self-fulfilling strategy. The more customers you can bring on board, the more market share you establish. The more ongoing value offered through your portal, the more customer share you establish. And the stronger a relationship your company can build with each customer throughout their lifetime, the higher the lifetime value of each customer-and from there, revenues, profits and market control can flow.
The customer chain is a concept whose time is ripe for three reasons. First, the Internet allows you to reduce the extreme fragmentation in your distribution channel by removing the time and distance that has forced each part of the customer chain to stand alone. Second, the Internet has provided a medium for directly interacting with any and all customers, and third, it has created a new attention-based customer dynamic where your market highly values the delivery of a knowledge-based category portal, accumulating tremendous digital value for your company.
With this Web-based customer-management "backbone" between your company and all of your service providers, you have truly established the basis for sustainable online competitive advantage. Your entire customer chain is building superior relationships with your marketplace, managing their attention better, delivering superior value, and increasing their lifetime value to your company. Your business is smarter and more aware of your entire market, because you now have an integrated view of customer behavior throughout your whole business network. This intelligence forms the basis for faster decision-making, better targeting, lower costs and greater market share.
Summary
Your company's ability to compete and win online is being defined by a whole
new set of market dynamics. These challenges demand a fresh appreciation of
customer relationships and organizational strategies. In conclusion we have
identified three critical issues that affect your success online:
- The Web fundamentally alters the customer/vendor relationship and forever empowers your customers to control their destiny, demand more rapid satisfaction and be harder to satisfy than ever before. Your online business must accommodate this dramatic change.
- Your customers have a new way to measure the value that you provide. No longer based on the lowest cost or best brand association, the new online value is based on how you enhance their attention and improve their ability to manage their time. This is known as "digital value."
- Both of these above trends change your business chain in a very substantial fashion, and require you to rethink the assembly and delivery of your value and goods to your customers. Your business must accommodate your customer's expectation of you as a knowledge provider, not just a product or services provider.
Your strategies must absorb the fact that your customers now perceive the total collection of ways in which they access your business whether directly or through partners, distributors and the like as a single, blended business chain that needs to make them successful. And this is what we call a "Customer Chain."
About Vignette
Vignette Corporation (Nasdaq: VIGN) is the leading supplier of e-business applications
for building online businesses. Vignette
enables Internet businesses to reach more prospects, attract and retain new
customers, increase overall customer satisfaction, and raise the total purchase
per visit. Vignette
powers more than 400 of the leading dot.com and Fortune 500 e-businesses, including
AT&T, BMW, CBS Broadcasting, CNET, Daimler/Chrysler, Drug Emporium, FedEx, Kinko's,
Simon & Schuster, Sprint, Tandy Corporation, United Airlines and Waste Management.
Vignette
e-business applications transparently automate the customer's side of the interaction,
taking away all the anxiety and work involved in being a customer. Headquartered
in Austin, Texas, Vignette
Corporation has offices located throughout Europe and in Australia and can be
found on the Web at Vignette.com..
Footnotes
- Several recent articles have been written on this topic including: www.iword.com/iword24/istory24.html, www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,21306,00.html, and "Look to Buy Imperative" by Forrester Research, April 1998
- See "The One-to-One Future," by Peppers and Rodgers
- Dell Computer has used this strategy quite successfully. See Interview with Michael Dell, Harvard Business Review, April-May, 1998.
- This horizontal business chain integration concept was recently written about by J. Neil Weintraut in Red Herring. See "Syndicating the Internet" at www.herring.com/mag/issue46/neil.html
