Potential Marketing Approaches for ISA (Intelligent Speed Adaptation) (PDF)

Diploma Thesis from the year 2001 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: bestanden, Chalmers University of Technology Foundation Göteborg, language: English, abstract: Summary English

New technologies carrying a social benefit are often facing challenges before they can be introduced successfully at the market. Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) is one of these technologies. The acceptance of those products is very low in the beginning due to the fact that personal advantages are not feasible.

Our purpose is to examine and understand possible marketing strategies for the Swedish National Road Administration (Vägverket). Taking care about the problem of products carrying social benefits we decided to base our study on the network approach theory. In addition to this we decided to use the managerial view about marketing, specifically the social marketing view.

Networks of all kind are of extreme importance to achieve a positive result in the marketing process of ISA. We examined networks regarding actor bonds, resource ties and activity links to see how strong the different actors are already linked together. The density of the different networks varies greatly between the different actors. Nearly all needed links are already established through other projects or the daily work of the actors. Most of those links have to be strengthened for future co-operations.

In addition to the network theory we use the social marketing point of view to take care about those topics the network view is not covering. The behavior of the potential adopters is crucial to trigger the whole network, therefore that only a demand of a certain product or service can start the whole network.

Benchmarking is a method we used to investigate the potential of ISA for the future by analyzing older technologies from the car-manufacturing sector. To make this comparison sufficient we used technologies that are also carrying a social aspect and had through these difficulties in their introduction process.
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