Raw Generation makes drinking raw, unpasteurized juice from fresh fruits and vegetables more

convenient. We make it easier to get the right nutrition every day to benefit from greater health,
happiness, and vitality. We wanted to create a business that would provide truly healthy and
convenient foods to busy people, since there are so few easy options out there.

My father and I started in his kitchen. We spent the first 3 days mixing different juices to come
up with our signature green juice. I left on Day 1 nauseous and nervous. "How could we open a
juice company if we couldn't even come up with 1 juice that tastes good?" Day 2 we refined until
we got a semi-decent recipe, and by the middle of Day 3 we hit a home run.

We decided early on that I would focus on the marketing and he would focus on developing the
production end of the business. This was key for us because we both focused on the parts of the
business that we had skills for and we both had clear objectives and boundaries. However, even
though we worked on separate parts of the business, we still did a lot of discussing. There are so
many details to be hashed out in the beginning.

Initially we promoted through social media and that was not going anywhere fast. About 6
months after we launched I rebranded the business and we were introduced to Lifebooker, one of
the many deal sites out there. Up until very recently, the majority of sales came from sites
like Groupon, Gilt, and Rue La La. Now we promote heavily to our customer base to encourage
repeat business.

We are very adamant about picking carefully how we promote our business – especially in the
beginning. Deal sites are great because you are paying for sales, not the possibility of sales. Sales
are key. Problems are easier to fix (or go away) when money is coming in.

Now we are branching out slowly to see if we can find other ways to promote that are not
necessarily paying for sales but paying for the possibility of sales – Google Adwords, magazine
ads, and in-person events to name a few. To this date, we have not found a marketing avenue that
has been as successful as selling on deal sites.
I rebranded Raw Generation at the beginning of this year (2013) after being in business for 6
months making virtually no money. The product we originally introduced had very little appeal
because it was made for a small niche market and we hadn't figured out how to tap into it yet.

I decided to jump on the juice cleanse bandwagon since it was becoming very popular. It was
right up our alley anyway since all it was fresh juices packaged together and marketed as a
weightloss product. This was Major Lesson #1: if it isn't selling, change it.

Right around the same time I was introduced to using deal sites as marketing avenues (Living
Social, Groupon, Gilt, etc). We started with one of the smaller sites, Lifebooker, and found that it
worked well. Instead of spending money on marketing that didn't guarantee sales, we were
paying for sales. After a few months, we hit a lull with sales from Lifebooker, weren't getting
anywhere with generating sales through social media and decided in order to increase sales we
needed to try focusing our attention on one marketing avenue.

So here's Major Lesson #2: figure out your options, make an educated guess as to what the most
effective way is to generate more sales, and focus all of your attention on it.

We had a few options as to what we could focus on: deal sites, health fairs, social media &
Adwords. We decided that based on our history with social media, it wasn't the place to focus;
we hadn't tried health fairs yet so that was a crap shoot; Google Adwords can get really
expensive really fast; our brief experience with selling on a deal site had proven to be a small
success.

I gave myself two weeks and focused 100% of my time on getting our products selling on as
many deal sites as possible. After two weeks, I had several deals scheduled and decided that this
was a marketing avenue worth continuously exploring. It has been my major focus for the past
three months.

What someone can accomplish in any given workday is limited to the resources available. When
you are starting out in business, resources are often very limited. This is precisely why it is that
much more imperative that you create a goal with a deadline and focus every waking moment on
achieving that goal. If at the end of the deadline, you feel you need more time, extend the
deadline. If at the end of that deadline, you are not seeing results (or the possibility of results)
change your goal and refocus.

Q1. What did company do right for attracting and retaining the customers?

Q2. How the company did make use of the opportunities/options for increasing sales and
revenues?
Q1. Case Study:
Few proactive IT- savvy companies spotted the shift in the economies due to IT developments.
Now their products could be networked and accessed at their customers’ sites and this
connectivity was cheap enough to permit their continual monitoring anywhere in the world. Even
General Electric, already the premier model for downstream service expansion, saw
unprecedented opportunities for strategic relationships and returns. For GE’s power turbine
business, for instance, its customers are major utilities, and they have good reason to hate
equipment failures. To reduce the risk of downtime, GE invests heavily in information
technologies for remote monitoring and diagnostics so it can deploy a technician ahead of a
failure. This strategic investment in IT has a dramatic effect on the profitability of GE’s
maintenance services. Most manufacturers cannot charge more than 90 to 110$ per hour for their
technical support because of price and benefit pressures from local competitors. GE Energy,
because of its efficient network-enabled remote servicing, can charge 500 to 600$ per hour for
the same technician. Moreover, the information generated by its continual monitoring allows GE
to take on additional tasks, such as managing customer’s spare parts inventory or providing the
customer support service. GE has created significant amount of customer dependency for its
services. The same kind of economies is at work at GE Healthcare. Its typical customer is a
medical radiology clinic in the market for a new MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine but
these customers have not purchased such machines. Given the rapidly obsolescent technology
involved and quirks of hospital finances, they have tended to lease the machines. Now even
conventional leasing has gone by the wayside as companies like GE offer to install the
equipment at no upfront cost and instead charge for its ongoing upkeep and use. Because of the
high value, complexity, and cost of MRI scanning, most of the activities like financing the
scanner, testing, calibrating and validating a scanner, updating software or upgrading hardware,
etc. represent a business opportunity for a scanner manufacturer. GE healthcare has positioned
itself as a complete solution provider for its customers. The strategic business result is a longer-
term relationship than a traditional product sale would have yielded. Under the new model, the
customer simply signs up, typically for a five year-plus relationship with a major asset. All
support and replenishables related to that machine are handled as part of the managed service.
GE’s ability to price those ‘miles’ right is critical to its ongoing competiveness. For an MRI
machine, GE must estimate the number of images that will be required over the life of the
contract based on the demographics of the customer’s service area. The company can make such
estimates because of its investment in information technology for network monitoring,
diagnostics and data analysis.
i) What are the business benefits of using information technology to build strategic
customer relationships for GE Energy and GE Healthcare? What are the business
benefits for their customers?
(7)
ii) How could other companies benefit from the use of IT to build strategic customer
relationships?
(3)