Service as a brand and its salience

Service as a brand and its salience

1. 
   Intangible – Eye-tracking services and their advantages need to be explained to consumers, followed by explaining what Realeyes can do to help, thus forming an entry-point for Realeyes’ brand to be communicated.
   

2. 
   Direct customer-organisation relationship – Realeyes would need to maintain an obligatory relationship with consumer while offering its services, given the nature of service-consumption.
   

3. 
   Complexity – The heterogenic nature of a service like Realeyes’, will introduce complexity in general, proving to be a challenge in some cases
   

4. 
   Customers – Human and emotional factors are involved. Since data collection is more of a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) service-process, gaining stakeholder trust and perception of service is important. For instance, if a stakeholder such as the audience was aware of Realeyes’ brand, he/she would readily participate in the eye-tracking data collection trials (Refer Participant Observation findings), compared to a stranger to the brand.
   

Berry (2000) claimed for service industry, company is the brand; to emphasize the importance of whole image will influence customer’s perception about its brand. However, more and more service companies now have sub-brands to define different services under the same family brand, e.g. FedEx Freight, FedEx Custom Critical (providing non-stop, door to door delivery for time critical customer ) and FedEx service. Some of the sub-brands will share the same family (e.g. FedEx ) while many consumer goods choose to have different names which consumers can hardly tell its origin of group, for example, Dove, Lux, Rexona all belong to Unilever. Applied into Keller’s CBBE model, if the sub-brands can share the same image and strategy, it makes sense to use the same family name since it can raise a broader and deeper brand association. (Keller, 2001) This theory is reinforced by Berry’s article “Cultivating Service Brand Equity” shown below.

Figure 27 A service brand model that can be applied to Realeyes (Berry, 2000) (The bold lines indicate primary impact, and the dotted lines indicate secondary impact)

Positioning can differentiate a brand from its competitors (Lovelock, 2004; pp.63 & pp.143). Indeed, since customer can only feel the product (which is service) from their personal experience or from the communication, marketers need to consider every possible aspects in order to ensure customer’s perception is “on the right track”, and accordingly increase their trust and preference to the brand. Realeyes’ positioning as a professional data-collection service-provider offering eye-tracking has already been discussed in the previous section 9. Next section, we discuss marketing Mix using the 7Ps (Booms and Bitner).

11. Marketing Mix

    1. Price

1. Research findings

1. 
   None of competitors seem to have a standard pricing approach
   
2. 
   The companies adopt a case-by case pricing approach as most of them are providing customized solutions
   
3. 
   Pricing factors taken into consideration:
   
   1. 
      Complexity of project
      
   2. 
      Client budget
      
   3. 
      Urgency
      
   4. 
      Size of eye-tracking project
      
   5. 
      Sample size and other such parameters.
      

4. 
   Also, it is implied that services may be priced and packaged differently to existing/prospective long-term clients as opposed to one-off clients.
   

5. 
   There was also an interesting observation when survey results of client willingness to spend on eye-tracking were cross-tabulated with value added by eye-tracking services.
   

Figure 28 - Cross tabulation of pricing results

2. Evaluation of Pricing Hypotheses (H3)

3. International pricing framework

Figure 29 - International Pricing framework (Hollenson, 2008)

1. 
   Firm level factors:
   
   1. 
      Positioning: Realeyes is an eye-tracking service specialist
      
   2. 
      Objectives: It is looking to attain larger business volume
      
   3. 
      Strategy: Relies on cost-effective operations and quick turnaround
      
   4. 
      Entry modes: Uses direct entry mode (operating expenses) with strategic alliances
      

2. 
   Product factors:
   
   1. 
      Stage in PLC: Catering to an emerging industry
      
   2. 
      Place: Eye-tracking is currently considered the 4^th-5^th most popular research tool
      
   3. 
      Positioning: The firm is looking to change results from subjective (qualitative) to objective (quantitative) and output reports from customized to standardized format.
      
   4. 
      Features: It can collect data from large samples in quick time and at low costs
      
   5. 
      Limitations: Dependence on Tobii machine
      

3. 
   Environmental factors:
   
   1. 
      Currency fluctuations: Australia has a strong economy and a stable currency
      
   2. 
      The Government encourages foreign investment and supports innovation
      
   3. 
      Advantage: Australia is highly conducive for starting a new business
      
   4. 
      Constraint: It has a corporate tax rate of around 30%
      
   5. 
      There is clustering of industries in a few areas like New South Wales and Victoria
      

4. 
   Market factors:
   
   1. 
      Client perception: Customers lack awareness
      
   2. 
      Ability to pay: Their willingness to pay increases after being made aware of the benefits and value added by eye-tracking
      
   3. 
      Nature of competition: The competition is low to moderate for eye-tracking but moderate to high for usability services
      
   4. 
      Competitor Weaknesses: Majority of competitors are less skilled at eye-tracking. Also, sample sizes used by rivals is generally small
      
   5. 
      Competitor Strengths: Realeyes does not provide recommendations while most of its rivals do.
      

4. Recommendations for Realeyes pricing strategy in Australia

1. Product line pricing

1. 
   Website usability has to be priced aggressively (penetration pricing) as this segment is more mature and there is good competition. Besides, samples do not need to have any special skills for most of the studies.
   

2. 
   The Pricing strategy of Digital advertising, Print media and outdoor advertising should aim to build long-term relationships with clients. In all these segments there is a good chance of regular business from clients, hence they should be treated with care and keeping long term returns in mind. Also, most of these studies require large sample sizes which can be mainly offered by Realeyes.
   

3. 
   Software and Game usability can be charged a premium depending on project factors and type of client. This is an upcoming segment and also the participating samples need to be skilled. The duration of user and eye-tracker interaction per sample will also be longer than other studies.
   

4. 
   Video/Television should be priced at premium because huge volumes of data need to be analyzed per sample assuming there will be around 20 frames per second and an average video will be around 30-60 seconds long.
   

2. Pricing across countries – Differentiated or Standardized?

2. 
   
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