Services are economic activities performed by one party to Essay

Services are economic activities performed by one party to another. Often time-based, these performances bring about desired results to recipient, objects, or other assets. (Wirtz, J., Chew, P., & Lovelock, C, 2017, p. 14). In exchange for money, time and effort, service customers expect value from access to labor, skills, expertise, goods, facilities, networks and system. However, they do not normally take ownership of the physical elements involved. (Wirtz, J., Chew, P., & Lovelock, C, 2017, p. 14). In order to complete assessment task 2 the author has therefore chosen MySpace as a service which has failed/ fallen behind in the recent years.

MySpace is a social networking website which offers variety of services such as interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, videos and other features. Such a website allows its users to create webpages as a way of interaction with other users. Users of MySpace are able to create blogs, upload pictures as well as videos in order to showcase their interser as well as talent.

MySpace was considered to be one of the largest social networking website from 2005 to 2009. Such a largest social networking website from 2005 to 2009 has started falling behind while other social networking websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have all prospered.

Myspace has therefore diminished to a cluttered afterthought of the power it once was. (Lee, Amy, 2011). In the year of 2008 Myspace was considered to be at the top. It was April, 2008 when Facebook took the lead and therefore never looked back which resulted in the decline of Myspace. Myspace as a service failed because it was designed by the people of entertainment industry and not by the technology experts, therefore leaving Myspace to not innovate at the pace which they needed to compete. (Lee, Amy, 2011) If the critics are to be believed then the old school thinking, red tape are also some of the factors which led to the fall of Myspace.

Other factors which led to its decline are over-enthusiasm and under-execution. Myspace created some features which were not bug-free, were confusing, dysfunctional. The developers of Myspace were not able to evolve the products/ features. An example can be where Facebook in the year of 2007 allowed the third party developers to make content as well as create apps here and on the other hand Myspace was creating its own products. This is another factor which led to its fall as Myspace should have allowed other people innovate on everything where they should have just picked some of the most important features of the application. Lack of adaption is the biggest factor which led to its decline. The founders of Facebook allowed the website to go wherever the market wanted it to and on the other hand the founders of Myspace designed power point decks which therefore described how they will invest, how they could earn a positive return on investment with projections of what would work. The biggest failure here was not leaving direction on the hands of the market for any potential feedback and crafty techies. (Anand, Raj, 2017) MySpace lost so much of market share to Facebook and therefore failed to reach the scale of Facebook therefore by losing core strategic functions which MySpace offered early during the days of its rise.

MySpace therefore took a portal strategy where they offered functions such as weather, horoscope which aren’t natural to the social environment. MySpace revenue generator was ads serving, therefore it was pressurised by its investors and partners where they had to take an aggressive ad publishing strategy and because of that the pages of MySpace became less attractive to its consumers/ users. During the initial days of Myspace when it was launched it gave users access to manage their web pages but after some time the access to manage own web pages was taken.

Market Segmentation

Segmentation is defined as identifying distinctive groups on consumers that have similar needs, wants, and preferences for a product or a service. (Reed, Peter, 2015, p. 144). Segmentation is a process of dividing a market in meaningful, relatively similar and identifiable segments or groups. (Kramar, R., Bartram, T., De Cieri, H., & Noe, R, 2017, p. 81). Book

The purpose of the term segmentation is to help marketers a) in order to define the customer needs and wants more precisely, b) help decision makers to define marketing objectives more accurately and to better allocate resources and c) performance can be better evaluated when objectives are more precise. (Book, 2017, p. 82)

Key Segmentation Variables:

A) Demographic Segmentation – It is described as segmentation of markets by age, gender, income, ethnic background and family life cycle. It can be seen that marketers often segment markets based on demographic information as it is widely available and is often related to consumers buying and consuming behaviour. (Book, 2017, p. 84)

B) Psychographic Segmentation – A segmentation of markets on the basis of personality, motives, lifestyles and geo-demographics. (Book, 2017, p. 87)

C) Geographic Segmentation – A segmentation of markets by geographic characteristics such as region, country, market size, market density or climate. (Book, 2017, p. 84)

D) Benefit Base – The process of grouping customers into market segments according to the benefits they seek from the product. (Book, 2017, p. 87) Such segmentation is different as it groups potential customers based on their needs and wants rather on some particular characteristic such as age or gender. (Book, 2017, p. 87)

E) Usage Rate Base – Dividing the market by the amount of product bought or consumed. Segmenting by usage rate enables marketers to focus their efforts on heavy users, or to develop multiple marketing mixes aimed at different segments. (Book, 2017, p. 88)

Myspace Target Market

Detailed Myspace demographics (Carmichael, Matt, 2011):

Age Range Male Female

14 – 17 14.8% 19.6%

18 – 20 27.2% 19.0%

21 – 24 14.7% 14.8%

25 – 29 12% 12.5%

30 – 34 6.8% 7.1%

35 – 44 8.4% 7.5%

45 – 54 12.1% 11.8%

55 – 64 0.9% 1.1%

65 + 3.0% 6.6%

Therefore, such a service was designed to attract young, fun and fleeing personalities. Users typically joined Myspace for fun. As such a service was more inclined towards entertaining friends, comedy, video games. Myspace targeted itself to students (23%) and single’s (60%). (Neher, Krista, 2009) Social Networking Websites such as Myspace targeted youth market with majority of its users aging 14-24 as they are the ones most interested in such websites. (New Media Age, 2006, p. 14)

Trends affecting the industry

1) Artificial Intelligence Driven Personalised Experiences – An interesting trend which has started the adoption of artificial intelligence where social media giants such as Facebook and Google are seen enhancing customer interaction. An example of AI is where specific products such as Intercom and Drift can now be seen on multiple websites. If the critics are to be believed then by 2020 more than 80% of the customer interaction will take place through AI bots. (Peters, Brian, 2019)

2) Social Media TV and vertical videos – Another trend has been the rise of IGTV (Instagram TV) where the service has come a long way. Such a platform allows its users to upload, share videos on Instagram where public can view it. Instagram allows its users to upload videos on IGTV from 15 seconds up to 1 hour. It is quite similar to YouTube. The author believes that IGTV is a direct competitor to YouTube as most of the users are inclined towards IGTV rather than YouTube. Such a trend is very compelling and sits just on the top of the news feed icon on Instagram.