We Googled You Freemium Pricing At Dr

Daniel Zanata Dal Osto – MGT401-KY 9/17/14

We Googled You Case Assignment
Read the case “We Googled You” and answer the following questions about the case in 750-1000 words.
Submit to the link on Blackboard by due date and time.
Minimum answer length of 750 words total
Use a separate labeled paragraph for each answer. Give each question its own section, with a title.
1) GOALS AND OBJECTIVES: What are the goals/objectives of the company in this situation? What is it that the company wants to achieve? Before the company takes any action, it should be clear on what it is trying to accomplish.
Hathaway Jones is going through a difficult time and the brand is getting old. One of the main objectives is a need to update and renew the products and the image of the company. The CEO saw an opportunity to open three stores in China as the Chinese economy has grown 70% per year in the luxurious segment.
For this plan work out, the CEO needs to select a winning team with young, skilled people and intelligent executives to take on the projects in the new stores in Beijin, Guangghou and Shanghai, getting into the Chinese market. This team should reach these goals and bring innovations to the market.
Mimi seems to be the perfect person to take on this project and be the main manager in China, she already lived in China and speaks Mandarin and the local dialect, she has experience in the field and she has an excellent curriculum.
2) STATEMENT OF ISSUE: What is the issue that needs to be decided in this case? Describe
The main problem is if Mimi should be hired by the company or not, because the HR found on the internet that Mimi participated of some protest against China years ago. This fact could undermine the whole deal with the Chinese government and come to ruin the project.
Another problem is that even this fact have happened years ago, her behavior shows an anti-china personality, this fact portrays Mimi as a person who doesn't agree with the Chinese policies and this is a factor that could cause a problem in the future.
The CEO has doubts about how much this fact could hurt the company, and find someone with the qualities and experience that Mimi has would be very difficult. So far Mimi is the only and best choice for the position.
3) SOLUTION ALTERNATIVES: What are 3 different alternative courses of action that can be taken to address this issue? Explain
1 – The company could hire Mimi and take future risks because Mimi is very qualified for the position and she would help reshape new concepts and she would help to raise the revenues of the company at the international level. She has enough experiences to take on this project and become very successful working for Hathaway Jones.
2 - The company should not hire Miami, because the risk that she would bring to the company are too high, competitors and even the Chinese government would know who are the managers of these stores and they would spread this information, hurting the image and business with the Chinese government.
3 - The company could hire Mimi but not send her to China, they could turn her responsible for the China project in the USA, she would still be responsible for keeping contact with the stores in China, organizing strategies and she would be part of the team that would take the major decisions.
4) RECOMMENDATION: Which one of your 3 options do you recommend? Why? How does this recommendation help the company to address the issues and to achieve their goals?
I choose the decision # 2 , I would not hire Mimi to work in China and even in the USA because it is a huge risk for the company, Mimi being in a position of management in the company she would be noticed anywhere and living in a competitive world as nowadays, we all know that the competition isn't saving efforts to destabilize the opponent, they seek problems in the products, they seek scandals about companies and the competition tries every way to destroy the adversary and Mimi would be an easy target for these people. Another reason is that the Chinese government is totally unfriendly to government protesters and Mimi is one of them. In my opinion the company can find very qualified people for the position without put in risk a millionaire project.
5) ACTION STEPS: What are the specific action steps that can be taken to IMPLENT your decision and to turn it into reality? What needs to be actually done?
1 - I would not hire Mimi
2 - I would improve the policy of recruiting new employees.
3 - I would give more freedom to the HR in spreading the available position.
4 - I would work closer to the HR manager in search of the best manager and the HR would participate of the interviews.
5 - I would look for a Chinese manager for the position, because Chinese people have different habits and values and maybe an American manager would not adapt to the Eastern style and the project could fail.
6 - I would hire a consultant specializing in Eastern Market.

6) How many words are in your answers total?
700
Second case assignment is on next page

“Freemium Pricing at Dropbox” Case Assignment
Read the case “Freemium Pricing at Dropbox” and answer the following questions about the case in 750-1000 words.
Submit to the link on Blackboard by due date and time.
Minimum answer length of 500 words total

1. Describe Dropbox’s “Freemium Pricing strategy” to get users and revenue. What was this strategy? What did the company hope to accomplish with this strategy?

Dropbox offers online file storage, well-known as cloud storage. Dropbox offers its product for free to any user, but the product will have limitations on its use, the company make sure to show the differences between the free and paid version and all what the product can offer in the paid version, different from a trial or test products where after a limited time the user cannot longer use the product.

The company should first have a differentiated product from the competition, so they applied some strategies such as:
- Focusing on the individual consumer market, rather than corporate customers.
- New concepts called freemium pricing, free basic services and charging for premium services.
- Faster backup and retrieval service for the files.
- Incentivize satisfied users to spread the word.
- Provide incentives for users to share the product with friends for more storage space.

With these strategies they intended to increase the number of users and take the name of the product to the largest possible number of people to show how good and useful the product is, with the objective of these users upgrade their free version to the paid versions, which is the real goal of the company. 2. What were the positive results of this strategy?

The strategies applied have had great success, because the company jumped from 4 million users in 2010 to 200 million users in 2013, and specialists speculate that the company had revenue of 400 million dollars in the same year. In 2013 the company was estimated at 4 billion dollars.

3. What were the negative results or failures of this strategy, if any?

4. What was the strategy that Dropbox used for corporate/business customers? Describe this strategy and its results.

After the company has done a good job bringing individual users and spreading the brand, Houston turned his attention to corporate users. They used strategies such as

- Giving full autonomy to managers control what employees are sharing.
- Do employees use the product and like it so much that they would indicate it to their friends.
- They released the "Dropbox for Busines" with unlimited storage and administrative control.
- Featured a "Single-Sign-On option," the program is installed in all computers in the company and all employees have access without having to log in their private accounts.

5. What other strategies can you think of that Dropbox could have chosen, instead of Freemium Pricing?

Freemium Pricing is a very good strategy, that is the reason this market grew 73% from 2010 to 2013. The strategy that I think would be very lucrative is to insert advertisements into the software; there are two main reasons for this:

1 - Users do not like advertising, and it would make some users to sign the paid version to get rid of the advertisements. These same users wouldn't stop using the software because they already know the benefits of the service.

2 - The company's revenues would increase considerably every year with this option, since the brand is very well regarded and it already has thousands of users.

An example of this success is the software Spotify, which offers an excellent service for free and also offers great benefits in the paid version. Spotify was the company that was able to convert 20% of the free users to the paid version and they have an excellent revenue both by users as by advertisements.