Intuit QuickBooks:
Assume the role of a marketing consultant hired to assess Intuit's operation and provide guidance for the future. Using the information in the case, conduct a situational analysis and offer recommendations for next steps.
1.Executive Summary
*QuickBooks is a stable, successful product with more than 3 million small-business users (4,5 millions total market). It shares 85% of retail sales. Moreover 1 million new QuickBooks packages and upgrades are sold each year.
Despite these positive points QuickBooks has two major problems:
*The dominant position allowed little room for future growth of QuickBooks.
*Absence of an online strategy is market share risky in a high growth and fast Internet market.
A new team has started to approach the online strategy and has found that small business companies seem to have a high willingness to use online procurement and electronic postal service.
The team has faced with a big dilemma: develop in-house the e-services risking being slow to offer them to the market and live room to the competitors.
04-02366 Donald W. Douglas and David R. Davis who ...
Company stores and offices and clinic of Delta Pin...
The headquarters of Intuit Inc. in Mountain View, ...Or, in order to be faster, to create strategic partnerships with current players of the Web arena.
Two major issues can be created from partnerships:
*QuickBooks has always been a high quality and stable software. How partners can assure the same level of quality?
*QuickBooks is famous for its customers support. Can the partners assure same high level support?
It's very important to reach the market as soon as possible because of the competitors, but it's also important to protect the Intuit's brand from risky partnerships.
In order to find a good compromise between these two opposite visions a precise framework has been put in place to choose partners.
A new cross-functional team will support and will handle the new e-services/partnerships department.
3 different levels of partnership have been identified: light,