For this unit of e&e our task was to act as the marketing team for the company brainient and come up with a new marketing strategy. my group consisted of Alex Ritchie, James Tomkins, Ge Lim, Madeleine sugden and Mark chapman.
RESEARCH
this is what i could find out about brainient through general research over the internet and the brainient website. Brainient is company and website which allow clients and users to create interactive advertising using there own software for a fee this will then be advertised in the same way as any online adverts over media websites and there unique selling point would apparently be that there videos have an interactive element to them.
apart from basic information on brainient it quite hard to find a lot of information on the company which made it quite difficult to research it and i believe this would seem to be the first problem with brainient, lack of advertising of itself so far. its major competitors are really sites like youtube which have a massive user base of millions and sites like vimeo which is also has an expanding use base. brainient on the other hand has a very small user base or less then 600 which for a company thats been around for 3 years is incredibly small, this could be due to the fact that where youtube and vimeo are free and therefore allow for free advertising for anyone brainient have a fee of £2000 per week which means there target market is more or less limited to larger companies that can afford those fees.
from using brainient from a research standpoint it was clear that it wasn't as user friendly as what you could call its competitor and found it to be quite hard to understand and in general use on a whole. i don't think there was enough help either in tutoring on how to use the program as for a first time user it really puts you off on in business that could be a deal breaker. i would also say that i didn't actually see how it was really much different to youtube as to an extent you can add some interactive elements to videos on there and when you have over on average a billion users on youtube a day i know what one i would personally use.
Breaking down Brainient
as a group we felt it would be best to break down the pros and cons of brainient so to help us make a better marketing strategy.
PROS
. the interactive features allow for more interactivity then other competitors so allow for more variety in the advertisements.
. allows the user to use flash to create interactive menus and videos.
CONS
. limited in what types of files you can upload to a select few.
. very small user base at present with little self advertising.
. customer service is great.
. too expensive.
. don't think most users would see it as being any different then using other similar sites.
Marketing Strategy
out first thought was to allow brainient to work with sites like youtube and vimeo and have it work within these sites whick oversley would increase there viewer base by thousands if not millions but we felt there maybe better ways to market brainient and the number one thing we felt really needed to be done was make it cheaper as the £2000 a week price tag we felt cut out a massive part of the market with smaller business and self employed professionals that would be able to utilize brainient.
our next thought was to tap into the smart phone market as at present there is around 450 million smart phones in use and this is a massive source of revenue if tapped into. so our idea was to create an app for brainient which would be much cheaper then the actual online product and be a one off fee maybe like £10 (not final) and this could give brainient a much larger user base which is really the one thing that it needs more than anything i believe.
so to summarize our marketing strategy would be to create a brainient app which would allow a person with a smart phone to use some of the functions that brainient has to offer at a fraction of the cost and by doing this we hope to create not only more revenue for them but also increase there user base.
