What Makes Boo. Com's Failure Inevitable

1.Which strategic marketing assumptions and decisions arguably made Boo.com’s failure inevitable? Contrast these with other dot.com era survivors that are still in business, for example: last minute.com

Boo.com lacked the expertise, resources and capabilities to be able to perform a successful launch simultaneously in 18 different countries all around the globe.

Two out of three founders have previously created a successful online book business in Scandinavia, however Boo.com was much more complex project to carry out.

Additionally, Boo.com had absolutely no infrastructure in place, which would help to kick-start the project and the ideas of the management team for specifics of the website was far ahead of developer’s skills at the time.

Ultimately,

In essence, this approach was ok if the size of this target group at the time of launch was not as extensive as predicted. At the same time there were still many barriers to shopping online both for this group and other potential targets such as most of the people using slower dial-up internet connection. This made a heavy demand on the promotional budget as Boo had to launch a new shopping concept; establish credibility for the brand and reinforce to the target audience that it was ‘ok’ to shop online. Boo has failed on the logistic side to achieve this, there were a lot of logistical problems in Boo’s supply chain, they could not handle all of the returns and there were quite a few cases of goods delivered

Physical evidence: the user interface had many graphical features which meant slow download speeds and was not seen to be user-friendly. When it is working, the online environment created by Boo was sophisticated and offered many of the interactive features that shoppers were looking for; however, this was not the case for much of the time. Furthermore, many shoppers did not have broadband and as a consequence could not enjoy any of the benefits. Process: the shopping process did not work in a streamlined way and there were many angry customers since an average order took up to 81 minutes to create. People: the website used JavaScript and Flash technology to allow Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar to assist shoppers, but this did not work very well especially when using a 56k modem and dial-up connection. Details of the marketing mix that relate to Boo.com are as follows:

•Product.

Premium brands were used, leading to premium prices. Unclear on mix between sportswear and high street fashion. Scope relatively narrow, limiting target audience.

•Price

As mentioned in the case, there were issues of pricing in different regions. No mentions of discounting are made, consistent with the brands’ premium positioning. However, competitive selective promotions are today commonly used by many e-retail