Final Customer Buying 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.

3. Intellectual: Segment customers on the basis of their current knowledge and understanding of the company and its products.

A. Knowledge of company and company product

2. Familiarity with specific product

Customer segment uses a similar product:
For work

No.	SIC	Year	Note
1	2840	1994	P&G developed a bar soap version of Oil of Olay moisturizer, which has captured a big share of the market despite a hefty price of $2.09 for two bars. That product helped account for an 8% price increase in the bar-soap category.
2	3500	2002	Palm Inc's rescue plan hinges in large part on winning over corporate customers with the new Tungsten brand. Of people who buy a Palm device, 80% use it for business. It figures it can go directly to IT departments, with the help of seasoned salesmen recently poached from Sun, Adobe and HP.
3	3571	1988	Compaq's strong reputation in the corporate market will give its new laptop its biggest push.
4	3571	1991	Dell has been running ads comparing its computers to Compaq's.
5	3571	1999	HP has increased its direct selling in response to Dell's success with that approach.
6	3571	2001	Compaq has continued to innovate. In the last year, it has unveiled a flurry of mobile gadgets. They include a hand-held computer, a two-way e-mail device and a digital music player. The iPaq pocket PC, in particular has been a smash hit. Compaq is getting new revenue streams from those products and related services.
7	3571	2001	Sun announced its entry into the low-end server appliance market with its Cobalt line of machines, Sun sells Cobalt appliance server packages for as low as $995. Sun in December completed its purchase of Cobalt Networks Inc., a pioneer in server appliances.
8	3571	2001	Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled a set of new low-end computer servers and so-called server appliances as part of a broader attack on the lucrative personal-computer server market.
9	3572	2001	IBM has doubled the size of its storage sales force over the past two years in an unabashed effort to go head-to-head against market leader EMC. Hewlett-Packard is also aiming to boost its storage sales force to nearly 1,000 in coming months.
10	3672	2000	After a string of acquisitions, Parlex now has the most diverse product line among flexible connector suppliers. They bought PolyFlex circuits for $19.7 million, giving them a new line of flexible connectors.
11	3695	2000	Iomega is a hardware company with annual revenues peaking at $1.74 billion in 1997. The company's success is due to its Zip products, which are floppy like 100 MB removable disks and drives. Emerging from tough times, the company has added a few new products thus expanding Zip capacity to 250 MB and jumping into rewritable CD markets. The company is recovering by building on its core competence, removable media storage, but coming up with new products that catch the trend of the times.
12	4512	2003	Delta Airlines business jet charter division launched a membership program that allows business customers to buy a set amount of flying time on corporate jets. The "Delta AirElite" program allows companies and individuals to buy global travel on a jet.
13	4800	2000	Boingo Wireless offers free downloadable software to access a high-speed wireless signal from the nearest Wi-Fi network. The service is about 100 times faster than dial-up Internet services.
14	4800	2003	In 2003, San Jose, Calif.-based WebEx signed a development deal with Norwegian video conferencing company Tandberg. It lets users of that company's systems use WebEx conferences as part of video meetings.
15	4813	2000	Microsoft and Net2Phone have signed a deal to allow Microsoft's instant messaging users to make free long-distance phone calls over the web.
16	4813	2000	Airborne promised to roll out a necessary ground-delivery service to complement its existing service in the air.
17	6512	2003	Shorenstein Co. has hired the Oakland Museum of California to curate exhibits of local artists four times a year at its building in Oakland, Calif., which opened last year and has about 170,000 square feet of space available. By hosting a reception for each new exhibit and keeping the building open three hours later once a month, the company is able to draw a high-end crowd capable of signing a lease.
18	7375	2005	Microsoft will officially launch its own search service. Loaded with bells and whistles such as local and desktop search and custom search feeds, the service is the company's formal challenge to rivals including Google, Yahoo, and Jeeves. It will be available in 25 markets in 10 languages via the company's Web portal MSN.com. Microsoft might be perceived as late entrant to the search, but it vows to provide the Web's fastest, most-concise results. Unlike rivals, it won't direct users to a bunch of links to other sites when they make a query.

<<Return to Acquire Steps