Distribution Issues

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Distribution Issues

• Jon Ivins, DMU

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This lecture will cover

• Archiving
• What is it?
• Why do it?
• Marketing
• What is it?
• Why is it necessary?

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Archiving

• Aims to ensure that all material is backed up
  safely
• Aims to ensure that all material is catalogued
  correctly
• Aims to ensure that all material can be found in
  the future
• Aims to save your time, effort and work!

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Archiving

• Why bother?
• Assets are valuable
• Clients demand change / updates
• May want to re-use certain graphics, etc
• Rights issues e.g. music
• Who did what, when and why?
• Costing future projects

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What should be archived?

• Different versions of the application
• All assets
• Images
• film
• music tapes
• text
• software code
• CD-ROMs used for testing
• And anything else!!

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What should be archived?

• Formal documentation
• Contracts
• sign -off / acceptance
• confidentiality agreements
• Rights that have been granted
• An index to find all of the above
• An index of assets and their location

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What should be archived?

• Scripts
• alterations and customer acceptance
• Budget Information
• What things cost
• Rights, performance, salary, eqpt, etc
• What the project cost
• What profit was made

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Archiving

• Is important
• Costs time and money to archive
• Budget for this in your project
• Use a systematic approach
• apply it to all projects
• prepare an evaluation of the project
• learn from it
• archive it for future reference

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Marketing

• Advertising and selling is not marketing
• Aims to find out the customers needs
• Must identify and anticipate needs
• This is a dynamic process
• expectations, economics etc all change

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Distribution Channels

• Identifies
• Target audience
• The correct price
• The correct product
• Where to place the application
• Cost is determined by that the market will pay
• Costly to produce software eats into profits

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Key Principles

• Know the customer
• End users or commissioner?
• Internal or external to your company?
• Retailers or buyers?
• Point of sale, information, entertainment,
  infotainment
• likes, dislikes, culture, attitudes, etc

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Key Principles

• Know the competition
• Direct
• In the same business
• Close
• Similar business
• Indirect
• Different product that steals your clients
• Future
• Other companies getting on the bandwagon

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Key Principles

• Know your strengths and weaknesses
• Best known technique is SWOT
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats
• Simple to carry out
• Highly informative
• Forces a wide-ranging view

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Key Principles

• Know your market
• Market research
• ask potential customers
• surveys, questionnaires, etc
• Use databases like Mintell
• trade press, adverts
• sales information
• Always ask
• Is the data complete, accurate and timely?

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Key Principles

• Know how to reach your customer
• adverts only work if
• your customer sees them
• time
• site of advert
• language used
• location
• promotions also rely on being noticed

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