Final Customer Purchasing from the Product Producer

Acquire Steps: Acquire steps include all activities the customer completes preceding the use or the consumption of the product. These steps include the customer's efforts needed for evaluation and acquisition of the product.

A.
Knowledge: Add knowledge

2.
Relative benefits – Help customers understand the unique benefits of your product

B. Establish reputation for brand

Get professional or third party endorsement

Industry leaders

No.	Year	SIC	Note
1	2004	0	Adobe was successful because it was able to complement power players. Acrobat took advantage of the multiple hubs, piggybacking on some of their products. For instance, Adobe signed an agreement with Microsoft, whereby the giant agreed to bundle Acrobat with its operating system for PCs. The Acrobat reader complemented but did not compete with Microsoft's Word and Internet Explorer because it did not have the ability to create or modify content. Adobe also allied itself with AOL and, in turn, was able to offer enhanced service. And the Internet's most popular search engine, Google, agreed to "crawl" Acrobat documents during searches, which gave Acrobat more visibility even as it enhanced Google's reputation for conducting comprehensive searches.
2	2002	3571	IBM agreed to license its thin client technologies to Neoware, to stop making its NetVista thin client product line, and to name Neoware as its preferred provider of thin client appliance products. This deal cost Neoware 375,000 shares of stock, or about $2.35 million. Neoware bought only product lines and, in some cases, a small staff of sales people. So, they were not tied down with assets and integration problems with other companies' information systems.
3	2002	3572	EMC is creating a program called AutoIS which will let corporate managers store and retrieve data no matter what machine it resides on. EMC Corp. teamed up with a group of service partners including Accenture and Electronic Data Systems to sell and install the systems.
4	2004	3651	Although they haven't much dented the iPod's appeal so far, a horde of rivals, including Dell, Sony, Virgin Electronics, and Samsung, will offer more than 100 iPod wannabes this season. Moreover, Microsoft recently announced new technologies that allow most of these products to work with dozens of online music services that compete with Apple's iTunes Music Store.
5	2002	3651	TiVo has joined with companies such as AOL Time Warner to help promote itself, DirecTV, Philips, and more. TiVo has had to fund this co-branding either in direct subsidies or as non-cash charges. TiVo recently agreed to exchange much of its subscription fees for brand-hyping from its largest partner, DirecTV.
6	1997	3861	Fuji has built a reputation for price, quality and sharp marketing and has won a strong following among professional photographers. This acceptance in the professional world has given Fuji a lot of cachet with amateur shutterbugs.
7	1991	3900	Kiddie Products gave away its products to Lamaze instructors, to promote them with Lamaze attendees.
8	1998	3949	Penn Racquets Sports has made their tennis balls dye-free for their new customers, dogs. The tennis balls have the Ralston Purina Co. logo, thanks to a licensing deal with the dog-food giant.
9	1995	3999	Since software companies use Avery label dimensions as their standard, every time the programs are used, a little endorsement for Avery shows up.
10	2001	5943	Small companies are using Web sites like Staples.com to find outsourced business services, especially as the economy slows. They're drawn by the idea of saving time and money. That is good for Staples and its business partners like NowDocs. They give Staples.com a cut of every job sold via the Web site. "Small businesses always are in a recession because of their size…places like Staples.com offer ways to save money." Small business customers will buy $100 billion in professional services by 2003.
11	2000	6211	DirectAdvice.com has made a deal with ETrade to offer its services to customers of the brokerage firm. The service, which normally costs $75 when accessed directly over the Internet, will be free to some wealthier ETrade customers.
12	2003	7372	Microsoft's goal is uniformity in the hand held software world. One secret of the company's success has been making sure that, on PCs, Windows was Windows. Microsoft created a standard environment in which the odds were very good that any piece of Windows software would run on any Windows computer. To ensure similar uniformity among Pocket PCs, Microsoft has imposed strict controls on their design. One benefit is cheap, commoditized hardware–Pocket PCs such as the $229 Dell Axim X3 can be great values.

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