Reference no: EM131093998

Introduction

How do you design or improve a product or service? By selecting tools available to companies that seek ways to create new designs or improve products/services that provide customers what they are looking for even if they might not know themselves!

In this activity you will explore you own ideas (specific to your company or possible new business endeavors that you might pursue) or evaluate others in a start-up. You will provide a reflective summary of your work in a two-page executive summary that your peers will evaluate. 

Executive Summary

After reading the Technology Expert's View from the Trenches: Trials and Tribulations of a High Tech Start-Up by Steven Sundheim in Chapter 6 of your textbook, you will explore the tools that are best suited for a company to design a new product, add-value to services that customers want, or develop new areas that will change an industry.

Tools best suited to the complexities inherent in the high tech world are:

• • Customer visits
  • Empathic design
  • Lead user innovation processes
  • Quality function deployment
  • Prototype and beta testing

You effort should reflect your interest, expertise in tools, and demonstrate your skills in understanding customers with the use of data collection and analysis. For example, you may decide to explore mapping software and other technology driven tools (e.g.social media, mobility devices, beacon technology, e-security) to impact your company or business to demonstrate the use for successful organizations.  

See AMA's Marketing Insights for other resources and tools.

New techniques in Web Analytics include Site Overlays and Geo-Mapping. There are many free tools available online to experience how visual mapping is being using in determining customer locations, center of gravity for channel distribution, and other graphical display of information. In this activity, Geo-Mapping will be used from a data-set of customer information and graphically displayed on the tool or embedded in another application.

Review the free access to Maptive (Links to an external site.). Create an Excel spreadsheet that will be used to map retail stores, customer locations, or other businesses of your choice. The data-set field should be at least 10 entries for mapping.

After using the mapping tool, write a 2-page summary analysis paper that includes the following:

1. Summarize your tool usage include a screen shot to explain the map and data set created for this exercise.
2. Discuss the benefits of site overlays and geo-mapping as outlined in Appendix 11A (chapter 11 in textbook).
3. Research an article to include additional examples, applications, and benefits of the use of this new technique in Web Analytics.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This summary will automatically be evaluated through Turnitin (Links to an external site.), a service that checks your work for improper citation or potential plagiarism by comparing it against a database of web pages, student papers, and articles from academic books and publications. Be very careful to avoid self-plagiarism, that is, using previous material written for other class assignments.