Yasir Akbar Marketing Strategy: Case Study CitiusWiki ECM/ERP software Thesis Kajaani University of Applied Sciences School of Business International Business Spring 2012 THESIS ABSTRACT School Degree Programme BBA International Business Author(s) Yasir Akbar Title Marketing strategy : Case study CitiusWiki ERP/ECM software vOapihtitooneahl tPisreotf essional Studies Supervisor(s) Perttu Huusko Commissioned by Citius Group / Jukka Jurvansuu Date Total Number of Pages and Appendices 20.01.2012 68 Citius Group Oy came into being in March 2011 as a need for his parent company, whereas his parent company started doing his business since 1987 as a common software business. Citius Group main aim to build a software called CitiusWiki which will help a company to combine all its resources via cloud computing and especially in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) sector. The main research conducted on Documentation tool and cloud services, which is an essential feature of CitiusWiki software. In which author tries to understand the need of the targeted companies of online- documentation. Since the author has worked as a trainee in this company, Citius Group consigned the author to for analyzing the market situation in European market and to develop marketing strategy for its upcoming software named CitiusWiki. Language of Thesis English Keywords Marketing strategy, Internalization, E-business Marketing, Marketing Mix. Deposited at Electronic library Theseus Kajaani University of Applied Sciences Library PREFACE I dedicated my thesis work to my parents and their kind support during my whole study time. Moreover thanks a lot to all my teachers to deliver knowledge and skills to me. Innova, for giving me an opportunity for doing my practical training and giving me a chance to put my all skills and knowledge on a reality basis. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ECM Enterprise Content Management ERP Enterprise Resource Planning B-2-B Business to Business Kajaani UAS Kajaani University of Applied Sciences BCG Botson Consulting Group SME Small and Medium Enterprises Oy prefix/postfix indicating a Finnish Limited Company ISO International Organization for Standardization OHSAS Occupational Health and Safety Assessment System LIST OF FIGURES 2.2: A simple model of the marketing process 7 2.2.2: Degree of service complexity 9 2.2.2(1): Types of service marketing 11 2.4.1: Seven-step model for market segmentation 18 2.4.2: Understanding customers: the key questions 19 2.4.3: Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG) 21 2.4.3.1: The forces driving industry competition 22 2.4.4: Target Marketing Strategy 27 2.4.4.1: Undifferentiated Marketing Strategy 27 2.4.4.2: Differentiated Marketing Strategy 28 2.4.4.3: Concentrated or niche Marketing Strategy 28 2.4.4.4: Micro or customized Marketing Strategy 29 2.4.5: The Four P’s of Marketing Mix 30 3: Process of Research Project 34 (B) Tables 2.2.3: Major direct-response media 12 3.2: Process of Marketing Research 36 CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background and motivation 2 1.2 Research Objective 4 1.3 Research Questions 4 1.4 Thesis Structure 5 2 THEORITICAL BACKGROUND 7 2.1 Definition of Terms 7 2.2 Marketing 7 2.2.1 Business-to-Business Marketing 9 2.2.2 Service Marketing 10 2.2.3 Direct Marketing 12 2.2.4 Online/E- Marketing 15 2.3 Strategies 16 2.3.1 Marketing Strategies 16 2.4 Theories of Marketing Strategies 17 2.4.1 Market Segmentation 17 2.4.2 Customer Analysis 19 2.4.3 Competitor Analysis 22 2.4.4 Marketing Segmentation 27 2.4.5 Marketing Mix 30 3 PROJECT RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 34 3.1 Research Essentiality and Design 35 3.2 Planning and Research Problem 36 3.3 Data Collection 38 3.4 Quantitative or Qualitative Research 39 4 DATA ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH 41 4.1 Data Analysis: 41 4.2 Research Questions & Results 43 5 DISSCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 48 5.1 Feasible Suggestion for the Company 48 5.2 Conclusion 51 6 SOURCES 52 APPENDICES 1 1 INTRODUCTION Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational pro- cesses. ECM covers the management of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email. (Association for information and Image Management AIIM, 2010) Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a pro-advanced form of Content Management, which combines the capture, search and networking of documents with digital archiving. Particularly organizes and classify the company unstructured information and data to one basic platform. According to Gartner Inc. Due to the increasing need for companies to manage content at the enterprise level, the worldwide enterprise content management (ECM) software market is expected to grow more than 12 percent per year through 2010, from $2.6 billion in 2006 to more than $4.2 billion in 2010, Inc. In 2007, worldwide ECM revenue is projected to total $2.9 billion, a 12.8 percent increase from 2006. Citius Group Oy Citius Group Oy is a privately owned company having four employees, two offices located in Kajaani and Oulu. The history of Citius Group Oy can be traced to 1987. When Harri Karjalainen and Jukka Jurvansuu started a company as a common software business. This company evolved into CitiusNet Oy. Since early 2009 CitiusNet Oy's fully owned subsidiary Citius Solutions Oy has been de- veloping CitiusWiki, initially to meet the parent company's internal needs and later as an independent software product Citius Group Oy was created from CitusNet Oy as a spin-off when Citius Solutions Oy's The business was sold to Citius Group Oy in March 2011 Citius Group's financial status is stable and normal startup company. 2 Citius Group's long-term strategy is to concentrate on CitiusWiki development and start accumulating a growing revenue stream from the product. (Citius Group Oy 2011.) CitiusWiki CitiusWiki is one system to manage all information in the company. It replaces existing tools to document, store and retrieve all kinds of information. The same system handles all internal process guides, quality requirements, contracts and projects. CitiusWiki is state of art Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) with versatile functions as intelligent and extremely fast search engine, which displays search results in less than one second and ranks results by relevance. CitiusWiki includes a customizable database system which connects stored documenta- tions to organized data. This unique combination enables CitiusWiki to function as an En- terprise Resource Planning system (ERP) in order to handle all business processes and re- sources. (Citius Group Oy 2011.) 1.1 Background and motivation Marketing Strategy plays a critical part when it comes to a company's success. Most organi- zations have three kinds of strategy: organizational or cooperation strategy, business strategy and marketing strategy. A well planned and executed marketing strategy will make a differ- ence in globally successful business or a failed one. (Woods 2004, 6). Marketing Planning for a business is a part of marketing strategy, which include of certain structured steps that combine the mission, organizational strategy and business strategy to give more information in the decision making process. Its help the company to go through the market analysis, competitive analysis and customer behavior for which the marketing strategy is developed and controlled marketing programs are implemented. It is important to figure out the targeted customer needs, to plan, offer the products and services which are specially customizing or designed to satisfy certain of these as fully as possible. To do that efficiently, it is important to find out their buying motivation and other