Boo.Com Case Study

Boo Case Study

1) In your opinion, what were five key factors that led to the failure of Boo.com? Rank them in order from most-important to least important.

I believe the biggest reason for Boo.com’s failure was the fact that they weren’t an established company to begin with, you can’t just spring up a company out of nowhere and take it worldwide and expect to succeed. Next, I believe the outrageous costs they had led to their demise; it shouldn’t cost $200 to take a picture of a shirt. I also think that how slow the webpage loaded really turned customers off to looking around. Another bad thing was that the inventors of the company didn’t have a lot thought out in terms of how many customers they were expecting and such. Finally, I think that their target market was not a very good one; 18-24 year olds don’t have amazing jobs that give them a ton of money to spend.

2) What was Boo.com’s company vision?

Boo.com planned to launch the world’s largest online clothing retailer. They planned to be the Amazon of strictly clothing, and to continue to grow through more markets throughout the world.

3) Describe Boo.com’s target market. Was this the appropriate target market? Describe why or why not.

Boo.com targeted 18-24 year olds as their market. I do not think this was a good choice, because teenagers to people in their early teens aren’t the wealthiest of people. A lot of them are in college or have jobs that don’t pay an extremely high amount of money. They needed to target people that had more established money.

4) As part of their branding strategy, they developed a virtual salesperson (Miss Boo). Do you believe this was a good strategy? Why or why not?

I do think that this was a good strategy. There had never been a website like this before for clothing, so I think this virtual salesperson was a good idea in trying to get customers to learn how to use the website faster.

5) As Boo.com was "Making their business case to investors," did they...