Craigslist's Ongoing Success Story is about an interview in which CEO Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist.org answers Jessi Hampel's questions about the website craigslist.org. During this interview, Buckmaster emphasizes on the concept that customers guide the business. According to him, businesses should focus on serving customers rather than on maximizing profit because when a business serves its customers well, it will make profit. Take craigslist.com as an example. The design of the website is simple so that its users can post their advertisements easily. Because the users do not want to see other features, craigslist.com does not have other features. In words of Buckmaster, "everything you see there today is the result of user feedback". Despite its simplicity, this website has been staying well in top ten most visited websites in the U.S. and remaining profitable since 1999.
In addition to the concept as discussed above, the article also reflects some changes in marketing. In advertising area, internet helped create many forms of advertising. Before the introduction of internet advertising, we had advertisements on publications, radios, TVs, posters or so forth. The introduction of internet advertising brought us other types of advertising such as banner placing, text advertisement, commercial e-mails, commercial clips on media networks … etc.
In the area of distribution, internet marketing helped shorten the distance from sellers to buyers. In the pre-internet era, we could only received the product we wanted only if it were available in the local stores. Thanks to internet, we are now able to place an order directly to the provider and received the product we want within the agreed time no matter where the provider is.
Third, in the area of business ethics, internet requires businesses to take ethical issues more seriously. The introduction of Web 2.0 gave internet users more controls over the contents published over internet. A criticism on a conduct can widespread over the world and destroy a marketing effort within a few minutes. Therefore, the businesses are getting more cautious with their activities to protect their reputation. For instance, on the website craigslist.org, a certain number of flags for an advertisement will remove that advertisement automatically. In words of Buckmaster, "inappropriate ads usually come down within a few minutes".
From my viewpoint, the concept that customers guide the business shows some advantages because it reminds businesses to value their customers. Customers are not only people who pay for products a company produces but also those who vote for or against the company conducts. Moreover, if a company knows how to listen to its customers effectively, it will have its own customers fuel its innovation. For example, when my previous employer lost many public telephone agents for our competitors, we had thought that it was because we paid them low commission. However, when we did a survey to collect the agents' ideas, we found that the main reason for their leave was the problems with our support services. Thanks to these feedbacks, we knew how to maintain our relationship with the agents.
Nonetheless, this concept also reveals some drawbacks because over-powerful customers will cause many problems. In the list of customers will be there some people who work for our competitors but we do know. If our competitors use these "customers" in order to make the chaos, it will be difficult for us to handle the situation. For example, craigslist.com removes a post automatically when the number of flags on it is reached. If a competitor asks they staff to flag hundreds of valid posts, the craigslist.com will face problem. Over-powerful customers may also make a company's strategies more market-driven thus prevent the company from developing market-driving strategies.
The introduction of World Wide Web led to initiative of internet marketing with business websites and commercial emails. Then, the introduction of Web 2.0 give some controls to the internet users and facilitated marketing through social media, social networks, online games, search engines. We are now can access to internet via smart phones and other handheld devices and mobile marketing catches the attention of businesses. Thought TV is still the dominating mean for marketing so far, the strong growth of internet penetration will make internet the dominating marketing mean in near future.
Reference:
Hempel, J. (2007, May 15). Craigslist's Ongoing Success Story. Business Week Online, p. 18. Retrieved from: http://find.galegroup.com/.
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