Final Customer Purchasing from the Product Producer

Use Steps: Use steps include all the customer's value added activities or the consumption of the product itself. These steps include all the costs the customer incurs in employing the product in its intended use.

2. Emotional: Segment customers according to the personal emotional needs of the segment.

B. Needs to avoid sources of anxiety

3. Economic limitations: Segment customers according to the limitations set by their economic interests and concerns

Savings of potential product vs. current solution
Level of savings over the current product cost system

High-product saves more than 25% of current solution cost, including user time

No. SIC Year Note
1 2411 1999 Technology advances have made it easier to streamline costs while keeping up production in the timber industry. Weyerhaeuser Co. is among many in the industry that have been equipped with computerized log cutters that require only a small group of workers to oversee.
2 2731 1990 Dover has an eclectic backlist of 4,000 titles on art, science, crafts, chess, music and architecture. Because some of these are in the public domain, they require no royalty payments – so Dover's books sell for 30% below comparable books elsewhere.
3 2844 2005 Over-the-counter whiteners, the cheaper alternative to in-office procedures, range from $10 to $50, include paint-on, dental trays and adhesive strips. It is less expensive than the $300 to $600 charged by dentists for custom trays or light-activated procedures. All treatments, whether in-office or over-the-counter, use peroxide to bleach the teeth. With over-the-counter trays and paint-on treatments, the improvement is modest. Crest Whitestrips, manufactured by Procter & Gamble, seem to be the most effective, often overtaking more expensive treatments in studies. They take less time but only cover eight teeth while professional trays cover the whole mouth. The version sold only through dentists office contain more peroxide and offer the dentist more profit because of high markups.
4 3571 2001 For the hand-held computer market, Palm and Pocket PC are competing to win new customers. Palms are priced $150 to $450 while Pocket PCs run from $500 to $900. Pocket PCs have better colors and faster processors than Palms, key for games which are increasingly popular.
5 3572 2003 A new line of storage products from EMC is expected to put the fear back in its competitors-IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard. The company will unveil the sixth wave of the Symmetrix product line, called Symmetrix 6, which includes five new storage devices. The speed of the systems is expected to far exceed that of current fare. EMC's new Symmetrix 6 data-storage systems are said to have an internal speed of 64 gigabytes vs. 1.6 gigabytes on its current system. Hitachi's top-end system runs at 10.6 gigabytes.
6 3600 1987 Odetics' $300,000 TV system for television studios has as many as 280 tapes arranged in slots. Robot arms can simultaneously select and play a tape, retrieve a finished tape from a playback machine, and return another tape to its storage spot.
7 3691 1998 The new Duracell Ultra battery will last up to 50% longer than ordinary alkaline batteries. They reduced electrical resistance, and reformulated the battery's chemistry. Duracell plans on asking a 20% premium in exchange for this improvement.
8 3861 2000 Sanyo this fall will introduce a new kind of compact magneto-optical storage device that will cost only a sixth as much as the flash memories now used; it will have ten times the capacity – enough to hold over 500 pictures at high resolution. At $20 per 730-megabyte disk, a picture will cost about 3 cents to store, making digital storage far cheaper than film. The cameras have the added advantage that they can be plugged into a computer or a mobile phone. The improved quality means more than 10 million digital cameras will be sold worldwide next year, compared with 5.4 million sold in 1999 and 7.5 million this year.
9 3861 2004 To tackle the cost of home printing, H-P focused first on paper. H-P had been using paper from expensive specialty mills. Then, last year, H-P executives say they figured out how to make photo-quality paper at a cheaper mass-market mill in Europe, slashing the consumer's price for a 4-by-6 sheet of photo paper to 10 cents, from 30 cents. Trimming the cost of ink was a more delicate task, because the company relied so heavily on ink profits. So, it borrowed a trick from cereal-makers, reducing cartridge prices by putting less ink inside, and making the cost of ink overall appear cheaper.
10 4813 2002 Low rates have been a reason for the success of voiceover-internet-protocol. Even if VoIP calls aren't free, they're still much cheaper than conventional calls, which can cost anywhere from $0.25 to $2.50 a minute. Routing calls over an IP network can cut the cost 75% to 90%.
11 4899 2004 VOIP providers are luring customers with traditional telephone features. The calls are cheaper than traditional landline calls but require broadband Internet access. Phone companies counter that they offer wireless access offering added convenience.
12 4911 1987 Scientist invented a commercial electrical generator powered by waves in the ocean. Power from the system should cost about 3 cents per kHz. That price is about one-fifth the cost of electricity from diesel-powered generators.
13 7372 1987 Adobe's new Illustrator program ($495) should compete with products costing $100,000 or more, running on much more expensive computers than the Macintosh.
14 7374 2002 Oracle Corp. believes it is cheaper for customers to buy outsourced software than to rely on an internal tech department. The president of Oracle's outsourcing unit believes their team can cut clients' software service costs by 44% to 66%.

<< Return to Use Steps