Research paper on the development strategy of digital products in network marketing

With the development of computer and network communication technology and the acceleration of world economic integration and globalization, information technology is more and more widely used in the business field, and e-commerce occupies an important position in business activities. In the development of e-commerce, there are many problems restricting its development. Among them, logistics distribution accounts for 25%-30% of the unit cost of Chinese enterprises, while it only accounts for about 10% in developed countries. In other words, our logistics cost is 2-3 times that of developed countries. This situation has seriously restricted the development of e-commerce in China, and online sales of digital products hardly need to rely on manpower and material resources to implement logistics distribution, which should be said to have its unique advantages. In other words, under the existing conditions, digital products are most suitable for online e-commerce. In marketing theory, price strategy directly determines the sales volume and income, market share and profitability of enterprises. At the same time, price is also the most sensitive variable that a marketing manager can control. Because digital products have their own characteristics in the network environment, their pricing methods are different from traditional marketing strategies. Therefore, price strategy must also be an important part of online digital product marketing. Many companies, especially those engaged in information-intensive products or services, have rushed into the network field, and new businesses have provided consumers with new digital products (including services). However, many enterprises fail to seriously consider the essential difference between the electronic market and the tangible entity market, and regard the commerce on the Internet as an extension of traditional commerce or a newly added distribution channel. They apply the old business rules and traditional marketing strategies in the new environment, which is one of the reasons why such companies seldom make money at present. This phenomenon means that traditional business and marketing rules are not applicable at least in digital products. It is necessary to consider new marketing strategies. Digital products refer to products that can be digitized and transmitted through digital networks such as the Internet. In the current electronic market, digital products are mainly information products. The general classification method is to divide digital products into tools, content and online services. Computer software and other tools; Content categories, such as stock market and financial information, news, search, books, magazines, music videos, TV programs, online learning and services of virtual hosts; Online services include FAQ, online technical support and after-sales customer relationship management. More and more new business operation modes, such as ISP (Internet Service Provider) and ICP (Internet Content Provider), have become the driving force of Internet popularization in China. How to make them actively produce digital products or provide better digital services is an important factor to accelerate their development. This paper attempts to seek the pricing strategy of digital products by analyzing their basic economic characteristics. Second, the economic characteristics of digital products have distinct economic characteristics, which makes their marketing and pricing strategies completely different from traditional tangible physical goods. 1. The special cost structure of digital products is that it is very expensive to produce the first copy, but it is extremely cheap to make subsequent copies. For example, once a book wins a prize, the publisher may spend thousands of dollars to collect, edit and design the first draft? ∷⒘9308 Muvalier? People? Do you think it's a shame? ⑽? Did you kill all the remains in the grave? I just want to go back to the tomb to kill the spasm. Killing spasmodic shallow 5 ting? /SPAN>。 The huge difference between fixed cost and variable cost is not the only reason why the cost structure of digital products is special. The fixed cost and variable cost of digital products also have their particularity. The main part of its fixed cost is sunk cost, that is, once the manufacturing process of the first copy stops for some reason, it cannot be recovered. For example, if you invest in an office building and decide to give up halfway, you can only resell it to recover part of the cost. If a movie you are making suddenly stops shooting, you may not be able to sell the screenplay at all, and naturally it is impossible to recover your capital. Variable costs are also different from traditional physical goods. For example, if the market demand for Intel's CPU increases and exceeds Intel's production capacity, at this time, in order to meet the greater demand and obtain more profits, Intel needs to organize various resources to establish a new factory. In other words, when traditional commodity manufacturers reach their existing capabilities, the marginal cost of production will increase. On the contrary, the production of digital products has no capacity limit, that is, no matter how many copies are produced, the cost will not increase. What's more, digital products, like many digital professional journals, are placed on their own websites for consumers to download for free. At this time, because there is no physical form of production, no manufacturing cost, no packaging and no transportation, the variable cost is almost zero. In other words, once digital products are produced, they have almost unlimited inventory. 2. Dependence on personal preference The extremely low marginal cost of digital products makes the traditional pricing strategy almost ineffective in the digital product market. For example, the cost pricing method cannot be applied, nor can it be priced according to the degree of competition. The most feasible strategy is to price digital products according to their value to consumers. Obviously, the value of the same digital product to different consumers may be very different. Real-time stock quotes are more valuable to stock speculators than long-term investors. In a completely information market, manufacturers of digital products can sell their products to different consumers at different prices, and these prices reflect their value to different consumers. However, in reality, this kind of personalized pricing (differential pricing) is difficult to work. With the current computing power, it is also difficult to collect, store and publish each consumer's preference information. In addition, it is unrealistic for traditional marketing channels, such as retail stores, to mark different prices for the same commodity. In addition, manufacturers of digital products will alienate customers. The dependence of the value of digital products on consumer preferences also leads to the "non-consumption" of digital products under the traditional concept. In other words, the value of digital products varies greatly for different consumers. Although the demand for various commodities is different according to the heterogeneity of consumer preferences, this difference is even worse for digital products. Therefore, in order to classify digital products according to customers' preferences, manufacturers should rely more on the signals conveyed by customers. In this way, product customization and differential pricing based on consumer types are more important for digital products, because the use and value of consumers are heterogeneous. For differentiated products, the pricing strategy is based on consumers' evaluation or their marginal willingness to pay, not the marginal cost of production. 3. Network Externality According to Metcalfe's law, the value of the network is directly proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the network. Metcalfe's law is based on the fact that every new user gets more opportunities for information exchange because of other people's networking. It is pointed out that the network has strong externalities and positive feedback: the more users connected to the network, the greater the value of the network and the greater the demand for the network. In this way, we can see that Metcalfe's law points out that there is increasing utility in consumption as a whole-demand creates new demand. There are positive feedback and negative externalities in network externalities. When it tends to be positive, it can play a greater role, such as fax machines and telephones. If only a few people own a telephone or fax machine, its value is very low; If all your friends or colleagues have telephones or fax machines, their value is very high. When a communication network is formed, their value will be the best. Network congestion has negative externalities; Many people have telephones, which is your advantage, but it will be frustrating if they use telephones so often that you often encounter busy signals. The software industry is another example of network externalities. Many software companies are developing applications for users of common operating systems (such as Windows), rather than those operating systems that are not commonly used. Other digital products also have network externalities. For example, the more people play computer games, the more popular they are. Contrary to the basic principle of traditional economics (things are rare), digital products with positive network externalities are more expensive. For example, a web browser, the more people use Netscape Communicator, the greater its value. So is Internet Explorer. Obviously, this kind of product has the following characteristics: using it as bait to attract customers (such as IR or Netscape), newly developed products or their Beta versions (such as beta versions of various software). 4. Wear-free Because there is no daily wear and tear, once a digital product is manufactured, it will permanently maintain its shape and quality. Durable products such as cars or buildings may have a long life, but they will still be worn and damaged or even scrapped due to use. However, the quality of digital products will not decrease no matter how long they are used or whether they are used frequently. Like any durable goods, consumers only buy once in the life cycle of digital products, so the manufacturer of digital products is actually competing with his past sales. Therefore, even without competitors, manufacturers are often forced to charge competitive prices-the lowest possible price. Otherwise, quite a few consumers will wait. More importantly, the non-abrasion makes the manufacturers of digital products have to carry out product innovation, and the intensification of competition forces manufacturers to speed up the pace of launching new products. This is the theoretical basis of Moore's Law and davydov's Law. The non-abrasion of digital products makes it impossible to distinguish durable products from non-durable products. Moreover, the "new" digital products sold by vendors are no different from the "old" digital products provided by the second-hand market. Therefore, digital products must also compete with "second-hand" products that are no different from it. How to curb the resale of digital products in the second-hand market is a severe challenge for digital product manufacturers. 5. Variability Because digital products are composed of digital sequences of 0 and 1, their manufacturers will lose control of the authenticity of the products after sale, that is, consumers can modify and combine the digital products after purchase, thus changing the original products and legally infringing the copyright of the original authors. Although most free file descriptions on the Internet only allow the dissemination of unmodified copies, in the world of 0 and 1, this is just an agreement and cannot be enforced in fact. In this case, manufacturers of digital products have to use various mechanisms to try to curb these behaviors. For example, specific techniques are used to prevent simple modifications. Although Adobe's Acrobat Reader can read or print files in PDF format, users cannot store and modify them digitally. Generally speaking, it is really difficult to control the authenticity of downloaded content at the user level, and some mechanisms can be used to verify whether the file has been modified. Using key technologies such as DES and RSA can protect privacy and prevent modification, but this measure is only effective when transmitting files. These techniques are useful if the buyer is worried that the copy has been tampered with, but they cannot enable the seller to effectively control the modification of unauthorized copies by the customer. 6. The advantage of reproducible digital products is that they can be easily copied, stored or disseminated, thus achieving the purpose of * * *. However, reproducibility is a double-edged sword. After initial fixed capital investment, the marginal cost of production is almost zero. If the manufacturer can't recover the fixed cost from the market, then either the quality of the product will decrease or the product will disappear without a trace in the market. Manufacturers will never provide products or services to consumers for free. Reproducibility leads to rampant global piracy, especially in developing countries and regions. It is uncertain to prevent replication by technology. "the Tao is one foot high, and the magic is ten feet high." At present, there is no unbreakable method or technology to prevent copying.