Better world books case

Anais Bonalde
Managing Consultancy Course
MIB – 2011 IESEG, School of Business

Anais Bonalde
Managing Consultancy Course
MIB – 2011 IESEG, School of Business

Challenges in a new phase of growth
Challenges in a new phase of growth

PEOPLE
According to a survey carried out for Mintel Group Ltd.in December 2009 [1], the most frequent online shoppers tend to be young and the use of internet as a medium for trading will continue increase because this is still a tool adopted by young people and their habits will not necessarily change as they age. Mintel Group Ltd. also found that the recession has had no impact on people’s enthusiasm to use the internet. In this context, the beststrategy of Better World Books (BWB) for manages people and clients issues, is to look for recession-resistant customers: despite global economic problems, BWB can focus on those consumers who continue to buy despite the situation. In fact, for this specific business, it could be say that the economical recession instead of a negative effect can have a positive effect because there are clients withreduced budgets -as for example young people and educational institutions- and the acquisition of books trough BWB means for them saving money.
In this sense, the strategy related with people and clients proposed to BWB, is to launch a communication campaign on TV and intensify the online advertising in order to continue increasing the sales as well as the acquisition of books which finally will betranslate in the growing of the business.
As in every business, it is vital to have a detailed financial control, to know the cost structure of the company and maintain an appropriate balance between revenue, expenses and efficient management of resources [2]. Thus in order to keep as lower as possible the costs of the advertising campaigns, BWB can go trough TV advertisement supported by theliteracy and environmental initiatives (which the media for sure will want to join) and the online advertising can be intensified with the help of the partner universities that is, in their web pages.

STRATEGY
ABOUT THE MARKETING [3]
Parameter | Recommendation |
Pricing | Maintain the monitoring of prices of major competitors (as Amazon.com for example) in order to keep competitive prices. |Product | Keep the control over the physical quality and topics of the books offered in order to maximize their returns. |
Promotion | Intensify advertising campaign oriented to recession-resistant customers in order to increase the sales as well as the acquisition |
Placement | Keep the strategy of shipped books at no cost to customers |

ABOUT THE COMPANY SCOPE
The recommendation isincrease the scope of the company promoting its expansion entering in a new market, for this case, the European Market. Since the entering method may result in additional costs that could affect the bottom line [4], in order to minimize this possible effect, it is recommended to enter under the support of an European university, gaining the opportunity of expand the business without the risk ofmerging or acquiring and the advantage that this strategy will allow to expand the range of books offered.

CAPITAL
The CEO must continue being the instrumental in getting the capital required for the new investments in the business and of course is desirable or is preferred that this capital comes from banks [4]. Nevertheless, BWB should keep open also to private iniciatives that could be presentand would be positives for the development of the business.

TECHNOLOGY
The case description shows that the line of technology investment is clear for the CEO and the directors team: they know they have been investing in software technology required for run the business in a efficient way accordingly to its actual growing: the company has its own web page for make buying and selling...