The Creative Kitchen (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 80%, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne (MBA), course: Ebusiness design for competitive advantage, language: English, abstract: The present report looks closer at the eBusiness model, the Creative Kitchen, which was developed in a previous assignment in the subject HGM 554 eBusiness Design for Competitive Advantage. The Creative Kitchen is a virtual community targeted at people that are interested in cooking and meeting others with the same interest. The aim of the business model is to facilitate personal atmosphere and to build up contacts among the community members. The Creative Kitchen is an interactive website that constantly collects information about its users to answer their individual needs and wants. Partnerships with six cooking schools in Germany, with sellers of kitchen accessories and utensils and with the online bookshop "amazon.de" are formed.

The main aim of this report is to focus on a specific business function within the business model. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) side of the business model is looked upon in detail. The main reason for choosing to focus on CRM is the growing importance for a business to be able to handle the large amount of information and data it has access to and can create in today's society (Bergeron, 2002).

The focus on CRM include looking at what kind of information that needs to be collected from the customer, how it is collected and what it is going to be used for. The collected data are; user recognition data, demographic customer data, site traffic and usage, purchasing behaviour, customer feedback and informational needs. Further the report describes the needed CRM operations and the benefits created for customer, partners and for Creative Kitchen itself. This includes multi channel contact centre, e-mail response management and coordinated campaign management.

The report concludes with underpinning that the technological applications are simply the mean to generate strong relationships for mutual benefit between customers and the networked business of the Creative Kitchen. However, by understanding both the limitations and advantages of implementing a CRM system, it can help Creative Kitchen to become a sustainable business for the future.