Based on your reading of Chapters 2 & 3 of the text including the “Unit One Open

Question

Based on your reading of Chapters 2 & 3 of the text including the “Unit One Opening Case” entitled Apple – Merging Technology, Business, and Entertainment, using Porter’s Five Forces Model explain how Apple can deploy Cloud-based CRM to gain business intelligence in the context of their buyer-supplier value chain. Be sure to incorporate your personal experience and any learning regarding the Customer Experience Management lifecycle.

Apple Merging Tech-

This migh sound hard to believe, but a bit more than a decade ago, Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, apple inc now back from near oblivion is blazing a trail through the digital world with innovation and creativity that has been missing from the company for the past twenty years. the uniwue feature of apples competitive advantages is that they come from customers and users, not apple mployees. That is righ the company welcomes products created by cosnumers to sell to consumer a trend new to business.

with millions of ipods in the hands of consumers many people are finding ways to capitalize on the product. john lin created a prototype of a remote control for the ipod and took his prototyp to amcworkd where he found succss. a few months later lin's company had apples blessing and a commitment for shelf psace in ts retail stores. this is how apple sipports the ipod economy Lin said.

In the ipod dominated market hundres of companies have inspired to develop more than 500 accsesories everything from rechargers for the car to $1500 fendi bags. Eric Tong vice president at Belkin a cable and peripheral manufacutrer believes that 75% of all ipod owners purchase at least one accesory selling over 30 million acessories to date. with most of the productes priced between $10 and $200 that puts the upod econmy well over $300 million and perhaps as high as $6 billion.

Capitalizing on the iphone

Looking at someone using an iphone is an interesting experience becasue there is agood chance they are not making a phone call. They could be doing a number of things from playing a game to trading stocks, watching at v show or even conducint business iwth a mobile version of salesforce.coms customer management softwasre. In a brilliant strategic move apples let outsiders offer sotware for the iphone and in less than 6 months more than 10000 applications had been created. In fact more than 15,000 applications are available at its app store section of itunes they have been downloanded a total of 500 million times. Now, many of the iphone apps are available for ipad.

The iphone and upad app store market is getting so huge rerlative to other smartphone markets that developers argue that there is little point adaption applications for google android or any other iphone competitor. According to jeff holden CEO of Pelagi INc when he crreated his social networking company he fully inteded to follow the convetnional wisdom for how to build a sizable fast grouwing sotfwarre company get your programs on as many platfors and devices as possible. But when he crunched the numbers he came to an interesting business conlucsion. 13 millioniphone owenred had already downladed more than the other 1.1 billion cell phone owners. To entrpreneurs, developing a profram for the phone auomatically provides a significantly larger market almost 94 times larger than its competitors why would i ever build for anything but the iphone Holden asked.

Capitalizing on the ipad

Apples latest release the ipad is a lighweight, portable tablet computer similar to the iphone that allows customers to download applications check email and play music all at a touch of the button. Both the iphone and ipad can multitask allowing customers to read a web page while downloading email in the background over wireless networks. The arrival fo th eipad dbrought a simultaneous expansion of the netwrok of accessories. Because the ipad was designed with an exposed screen and without a camera a separate keyboard, emory card sltos, or expansion prots, one might it was specifically built for accsories. Many owners will modify it in some way where for mere deoration or hard core protection.

Apple has constistenly outperformed is key rivals throught the development of its mp3 player, the ipod, and contunues to make its products smaller and less expensive, while providing complementary features such as games and applications. For the iphone, apple eveloped a unique application called siri, a voice activation sustem that is capable of recognixing voice commands. Siri can perform all kind of funcitions from dialin a contact and creating an email to location services such as Find my iphone. ensuring lost phones are found quickly.

Apples latest offering is a new service call the icloud. The icloud has the ability to collect al of the content, including videos, photos, songs, books etc from cusotmer devices such as ipods and ipads and iphones in one secure location in the could. Apple customers no longer have to wrorry about backing up their applications or data because everything is automatically uploaded and stored in the icloud when usign and apple device. In a fast paced technology driven secotr with copetitors quickly following suit, apple s constanly pressured to develop new products and product extensions. Luckily apples atays ahead of theby focusing on the the following key competive advantagesL

customer focus

resources and capablitiyes

strategic vision

branding

quality focus

Explanation / Answer

Using Porter's five forces model,

The 5 forces are: threat of new entries, supplier powers, buyers power,
threat of substitution and competitive rivalries
1. Threat of new entries: New entrants have to find a way to offer better products at
affordable prices. • Apple already has a strong brand image, innovation and customer service
– making it difficult for new entrants to compete against them.
New entrants faces difficulty matching or beating the supply chain cost structure.

2. Supplier powers: The unique the product is, the more bargaining a supplier can do.
Apple reduced the power of chip makers by designing their own chips.
Apple reduced the power of manufacturers, like Foxconn, by buying manufacturing
equipment and only allowing the equipment to be used for Apple products, not for any other products
Apple reduced the power of distributors by taking over retail distribution
and product services through the Apple Store and by advertisements.

3. Buyer power: In this case, keeping switching costs high and features same and transferable
is apple strategy, because it has a large number of customer, hence less bargaining.

4. Threat of substitution: Other companies dont have the subsitutes of many of the apple products
like wearables, cheaper version of macbook 8. Also , so many features that satisfy customer needs is
provided by apple only.

5. Competitive Rivalries: Like in Android, there are so many competiters, providing same features
either on the same price or different price, Apple has made it easy by making pricing the focal
point, that is too far from its competitors. It is far away from low end markets. Its customer
does not require a substancial investment.

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