A case study of representational activity at a customer-centered business

Abstract

It is not clear what kinds of content-information and interactive mechanisms-businesses should put into their online sites. The content of existing online businesses is driven by metaphors of the Web as either "online catalog" or "electronic paper." Such content clearly underutilizes the interactive capabilities of online technologies. In this paper, it is argued that successful businesses have evolved "offline" practices that can beneficially be translated online. The paper shows how such practices can be uncovered by observing business representational activity and coding these observations in terms of the movement of information across media, enabling the systematic exploration of the space of potential interactive mechanisms. Specifically, a method for analyzing business representational activity is introduced. The method is demonstrated on a successful small business that at first might not appear to benefit from online content beyond that provided by the catalog metaphor. However, the analysis reveals several interactive mechanisms, including a product expert that personalizes a combination of products based on customer-specified problems and a mechanism that automatically calculates product consumption rates, sending customers e-mail reminders to repurchase near the end of a product's life span.