Blackberry Webqual and Value Creation Essay -- Technology, Website, We

1 Introduction 2 Purpose of the website Before analysing the quality of the website of Blackberry and investigating their value creation, it is important to have the purpose of the website clear. The way in which a company uses it’s website is part of the business strategy. 2.1 Introduction to website purpose According to Tassabehji (2003-83) there are four main reasons to use a website: information dissemination, data capture, promotions & marketing and transacting with stakeholders. Two of these purposes for a website apply for Blackberry.com. First of all a corporate website could provide information dissemination. The information can target different stakeholders: shareholders/investors and customers (Tassabehji 2003-83). In case of the shareholders and investors information on the website could include annual reports, news about the corporation and business plans. This is different when customers are the target, since they will be more interested in information about the products, support and question solution. Secondly, Blackberry.com also uses the internet for promotions & marketing. Promotions and marketing online are available in different ways (Tassabehji 2003-91). Tassabehji (2003-91) distinguishes six different ways of online promotion and marketing: banner advertising, affil iate programmes, search registration, newsletter e-mails, and traditional marketing strategies. 2.2 Blackberry.com The main purpose of Blackberry.com is information dissemination, mostly for the customers, but they also provide some interesting information for the shareholders. Blackberry.com provides a lot of information to the customer online, including: product specifications, different kinds of support, interactive demos, manuals ... ...With those two methods, Blackberry.com encourages their customers to solve out difficulties their selves, consequently Blackberry can reduce the costs on service staff members. Apart from the online service, Blackberry also provides a lot of service via mobile network carriers, since the contract of a Blackberry is often combined with a network contract. Although tough technical problems will still be solved by the Blackberry factory itself, easier problems can be worked out by the carriers. This again results in cost reduction for Blackberry and could be seen as an efficiency resource. 4.2 Novelty 4.3 Lock-In 4.4 Complementarities Complementarities are created when one resource is getting more value when it is combined with another resource ( Zhu 2004). The value of the two resources together is more than the sum of both resources separately.