55-04.
AFFILIATION
Pattern description
The focus lies in supporting others to successfully sell products and directly benefit from successful transactions. Affiliates usually profit from some kind of pay-per-sale or pay-per-display compensation. The company, on the other hand, is able to gain access to a more diverse potential customer base without additional active sales or marketing efforts.
Inventive problems
The company should have many stores to be close to the customers.
The company should have few stores (do not have your own stores at all) to reduce cosst.
It’s necessary to perform all the operations of the Value-added chain to create the product.
It’s necessary to perform minimum number of the operations of the Value-added chain in order to minimize the overall workload of company.
The company should constantly keep in touch with customers to attract them and to encourage customers to re-purchase.
The company should minimize communication with customers in order to reduce costs.
Application examples
Affiliate marketing really took off when Amazon introduced its Amazon.com Associates Program in 1996. Amazon, at the time still an online book store, obtained US patent number 6029141 for an ‘Internet-based customer referral system’, despite the fact that several other companies had previously employed such systems. With this system, owners across the world could recommend books to their readers and participate in Amazon’s success by collecting commissions on sales.
A good number of websites and their parent companies would not exist without such affiliate marketing programmes. For them, Affiliation is the central revenue generator in their business model. A prime example of this process is the social network Pinterest, which became successful not only through its buzz-worthy design, but especially on the clever use of commissions