مدلسازی دلایل به منظور ایجاد B2C در صنعت مد

The Internet is changing the way in which businesses operate. ‘Brick and mortar’ companies can now use the Internet to reach more customers and sell products in addition to the traditional channels. Moreover, the Internet is an excellent means of communication and advertisement. Nevertheless, only a minority of the businesses operating in the fashion sector have developed e-commerce. This paper studies the decision of establishing B2C in one of the Top European fashion designing businesses. The findings show that the use of cognitive maps can help in the decision making process identifying the true strategic objectives that a firm pursues.

The numbers of traditional businesses that are using business to consumer (B2C), one of e-commerce (EC) activities, as a new marketing channel are growing rapidly. The first objective is to use this for businesses advertising, but for many businesses has evolved into the use of additional services, like ordering channel or web customer support channels. For firms engaging in conventional ‘brick and mortar’ activities, the use of EC offers a new opportunity to extend and increase their market value (Amit and Zott, 2001 and Subramani and Walden, 2001). Though the market values for numerous firms operating in e-commerce have been high, some of them incur more losses than profits (Chaudhury et al., 2001). Very few of the firms undertaking the adventure of B2C are currently working in the stock market, so the goals and purposes for the stockholders and management for the rest of the companies will be different when they commence this path. Achieving success with B2C is difficult. To know with precision, the decision maker's expectations before actual implementation of the tool, gives important information for future high-quality development in the market. For this reason the authors consider this paper a useful endeavour that can help to identify the legitimate reasons that decision makers have to establish B2C and the competitive advantages that are associated with them. Secondly, this knowledge facilitates the development of appropriate business and EC strategic goals. This paper contains in Section 2 the theoretical background and research justifications. Section 3 includes the case study, sector, business and research model. Section 4 presents the findings and discussion. Finally Section 5 shows the conclusions.

This research reveals how the knowledge of the top manager cognitive process can help in the decision making process. It offers the means to obtain the true thought behind the manager process of decision making. In relationship with studies made about the reasons to establish B2C in other industries, our study offers different results because we use methods that can extract the true motivations that are in the decision makers' minds and the relative importance that every construct has compared to the others. B2C can add significant Competitive Advantages with Cost Reductions. However, in our study the creation of most important Competitive Advantages comes from Growth and Differentiation. As a way to facilitate the purchase of consumers, B2C will make them much more well-informed about what products are available and enable them to buy with fewer obstacles. This can be a crucial first step because the target audience can appreciate the value that products can provide. This fact helps to amplify the brand recognition and consequently, together with other reasons, to impact the company's bottom line. The main contributions of this research are to fully make good use of the benefits that B2C can offer. Thus, companies must: • Identify the true reasons that decision makers have to establish B2C and the competitive advantages that are associated with them. • Establish the business and the B2C strategic goals together in relationship with these reasons. The situation facing this study can be used as a frame to apply to other companies' decision making processes operating in the fashion industry and analogous industries which would benefit from this paper. The applications of this study to the field relate specifically to fashion industry businesses searching for information of reasons to establish B2C. Also, this finding can offer a number of important implications for managers and researchers working within the B2C in general.