Friday September 30, 2011 MKT1003x Tutorial Section: W15 Marketing Individual Assignment by: Marie Lachapelle A0090362

Jason Electronics: Reaching Out to Buyers The demand for products or services from firms is derived from the consumers' demand for what the firm is producing. Accordingly to income, preferences, taste, substitute and the microeconomic factors, the demand for the products will change. Then, the firm will need more resources to produce its good or service offered. The demand from firm to firm will be linked to the demand from market to firm; from its variation will be derived the demand for industrial demand. Often, derived demand has to be estimated according to the expectation of future demand for the product from consumers. For Jason Electronics, the company is providing the industry with products that are used for industrial purpose. The demand is then derives from another business demand curve, since the final consumer is not the next one in the chain. We could say that demand is derived twice for this company. However, in some occasion, the link to the final customer is closer. For example the leisure boat industry. When a new boat is built, there is a demand for Jason Electronics products. It is derived from when the demand for pleasure boat increases, which depend on many factors directly from the customer such as income, preferences, substitutes. We could consider that kind of boat as a superior good and anticipate that when income increases, demand increases. This industry is therefore only one of Jason Electronics customer, we also need to consider other industries, for which demand is derived because they are not directly providing to consumers. Since it serves many industries, there is a great diversification of demand curves. The correlation between them is unknown, but could be considered when drawing Jason Electronics demand curve.

Jason Electronics produces marine technology and automation systems. Its consumer are from fishing, oil and gas industry, to name a few. The need for implementation of a technological electronic system is when a new boat is built or when old equipment has to be replaced by new and better one. The demand for Jason Electronics' products is then derived from the demand of these new boats. Since they are used in many industries, we need to consider demand for fish, oil, pleasure boats, gas and shipping. A Buying center consists on a group of people sharing knowledge, goals and risks to make a common decision. Participants in this group differ from one organization to the other, but necessarily consist of persons able to perform the following roles: users, influencers, buyers, deciders, gatekeepers. Within the shipyard, the actors that we consider are Ship agents, managers and owners as well add the ship personnel. They are more likely to be part of the team because they are the ones using it and paying for it. Managers will be performing the buyers role, users are obviously the agents and personnel, deciders need to have technological knowledge of the product so it will be the owner or agent, depending on the type of industry. In this industry, technology is the main developing aspect. Development of technological knowledge and innovation is a trend to competitive advantage. The major opportunities on the market are to fight with competitors by offering quality service at lower price. For example, in 2002, China became the world's third largest shipbuilder, competing with fast development and lower cost products and services. Industry is leaded by Asian countries because they have access to cheaper labor and material. Europe and the US , smaller and privately owned companies are common among the industry. The way Jason electronics use its competitive advantage is by providing effective follow-up on his products. The after-sale service is very important for them and this way they can have a loyal clientele. Future in this industry goes to leisure boats department, since it is a huge part of the market and a fast growing business. The growth of this business is supposed to be higher than the actual GDP growth, it is therefore an excellent potential for the industry to focus on sales to recreational boats.

The survey Jason Electronics did was responded by 35 persons. The methodology used seems to be accurate and appropriate, since it has many categories, describing well every possible aspect that the company needs feedback on. However, to improve the quality of the survey, they could change the scale from 5 to 10 this way responders would give more precise answers. As we see on the result sheet, all the means of company performance are around 3. By using a scale from 1 to 10, people would have more choice and the results would be more representative. Also, since they have diversified customers, with different backgrounds and needs for the products, maybe they could do more specific categories questioning the needs of these customers. By splitting the survey, they would need to have more responders, but they would get a wider range of answers to work with and improve specific services according to more specific needs for each domain they are working with. By the results we can tell that the service offered by the personnel of Jason Electronics is rated as important. In general, there were good results given to the evaluation of the sales persons, engineers and customers service personnel. However, since it is a technological industry, the quality of the products is a priority. The company needs to work on lower its products costs and have a wider range of products. They could do so by installing a R&D team or by directly asking the companies what kind of new products they need. For the costs, its the Buying Center's role to get the pieces for lower price and the managers task to increase efficiency in order to reduce costs of production. When selling to their industrial customers, the company should negotiate with the other party to make sure they are satisfied with the price, which seem not to be true now according to the survey.