An example of trust-based marketing and customer advocacy in e-commerce

Abstract

Professor Glen L. Urban at MIT Sloan advocates a new style of marketing based on trust-building. One way to build this trust is to use an advisor to have a conversation with the customer rather than talking at the customer. The purpose of the Suruga Bank project is to test the effects of an advisor-based system in Japan. A loan advisor for Suruga was built which contains two versions: a female person advisor and a cartoon advisor. Additionally, a loan competitor advisor was built comparing Suruga to other Japanese banks. The purpose of the loan advisor is to measure the effectiveness of advocacy and trust on another country, namely Japan. Now that the implementation of the advisor is almost complete, the project is ready to be moved into the market research phase and the results will be obtained by Fall of 2006. The Suruga project has enlightened me on some of the differences in marketing internationally vs. domestically. Through solving the technical PHP and other web-programming issues during this project, I have also become a much more proficient web programmer. In the future, Dr. Urban hopes to continue the project to study marketing in Japan and perhaps add additional features to the site such as morphing.