Draft Proposal Status:�

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Index
Minutes
Draft Proposal



Technical Proposal
Responsibility
and Project Planning
Management &
Accounting

 with Client

First Prototype
Revised Proposal
Final Prototype
Final Report
Final Evaluation
Module Feedback

The online theatre guide industry has experienced a rapid growth over the past 30 months as more businesses and established theatre guides have realised the benefit of the Internet as another marketing medium.

The popularity of the Internet is growing exponentially. Those who are familiar with the information superhighway are well aware of how fun, addictive and relaxing surfing the Net can be.

Due to extensive competition, new online theatre guides must look for ways to differentiate their place of business from others in order to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. Switchblade Designs realise this need for differentiation, which is why our site will be unique from all those on the web at the moment. Our site will be a truly interactive multimedia experience that aim�s to immerse the user in a virtual Theatreland, and control every aspect of their experience to choosing a show to watch.

The Switchblade designs realise the need for differentiation. They strongly believe that a truly interactive theatre guide where the customer doesn�t feel as if he / she is dealing with their computer, but rather feeling immersed in an "experience" is the key to success. The fact that the current batch of online theatre guides are just extensions of founded theatre guides presents Switchblade Designs with a chance to enter the window of opportunity and enter into a profitable "niche" market - niche because what we are trying to do has not been done before. The current batch of online theatre guides is more like brochures than any multimedia experience.

Our industry participants can be broken down in to three groups: Customers, Clients (London Borough of Westminster, who own Theatreland and the European Commission), and Advertisers. Customers would visit our site, and use it free of charge. (There are plans in the future to make several of our services subscription only, but that is in the future.) If the Customer would want to book a seat at a production, then we would charge a set-booking fee per ticket, with discounts on group bookings.

Advertisers would use our site to "sell" their product, via the use of banners. This would involve us holding their banner image on our site for a fixed monthly rate.

Currently, the Internet has various sites with information relating Theatres. A simple search using the Yahoo search engine (UK & Ireland sites only), brings up the following:

This proposal should make sufficient impact to ensure that after its completion of the proposal we are not simply looking at yet another �Theatre Site�. However, we must make the point that, a large proportion of these sites will have referential information relating to the theatre. Very few of them are likely to give the "Virtual Theatre Tour".

After selecting five of the above sites at random the following conclusions have been made, both in terms of the content of these site and the actual design features.

http://www.murdermyst.com

Design Issues:

  • Primarily optimised for: Netscape Navigator.
  • Clip-art images, although in the form of cartoons, complement the descriptions and titles of the shows.
  • Does not portray the virtual theatre experience. (Although the site is not a relating theatre, the concept behind it, of brining the theatre to you, - in large enough quantities can be considered a threat to the theatre industry, and hence a competitor to us).

Content Issues:

  • Key selling point is �why go to the Theatre, when the Theatre can come to you�.
  • No substantial content, a couple of lines for each of the shows.

Market Issues:

  • Market seems to be focus solely on New Jersey, however this is not clear from the web-site.

http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/

Design Issues:

  • Looks very �magazine� like.
  • Fails to give the virtual theatre experience. More like picking up a �Time Out� Guide.
  • Very little in the form of pictures.
  • Very quick to load.

Content Issues:

  • Gives information about what�s on where, and brief descriptions of what it is about.
  • Information relating to how to get there is also included.
  • Who to contact for tickets.
  • Pricing information also given.
  • Covers a wide variety of topics briefly.
  • Provides hyperlinks to other sites for additional information about the production.

Market Issues:

  • Information is particular to London, and is therefore a strong competitor.

http://www.slowdrag.co.uk/slowdrag/home.htm

Design Issues:

  • Although, high on content the site does seem to resemble a piece of paper on a screen. There are pieces of animation, But again no real resemblance to the virtual theatre experience. Good use of colours and consistency of web page design. Standard menu bar at the top of the page, but this disappears as the user scrolls down. It may have been better advised to use a frame page to ensure the menu always remains.

Content Issues:

  • This site was dedicated to information about a particular show � The Slow Drag.
  • The site was built to promote the showing of the musical at the Whitehall theatre in London. The show is no longer performing, but this site has been reviewed, to show the potential of competitors who decide to focus on particular shows.
  • There is a great deal of information relating to the musical, the characters and information relating to ticket pricing, how to get there by tubes, busses and information about car-parks. Clearly, quite well thought out. Great attention is played to as to ensure that information is conveyed, without giving away the plot.

Market Issues:

  • Currently, this show is not currently being performed, but as stated above, this site has been included as an indication of the type of competition that we can expect from sites that are dedicated to single shows.

Directional Management:

From the review of these sites it is quite clear that the essence of the virtual theatre has not yet been fully captured. To look into this a little further, we must consider what the Virtual Theatre Experience actually comprises of.

When people go to the theatre they have a mixture of emotions; often these can be described as Fear, anticipation, anxiety, and the expectation of not knowing what to expect. Our web-site should attempt to be able to capture these emotions. It needs to be inviting to the user, giving them a sense of actually being there, and not simply reading something that they could pick up from any newsagent in central London. No matter where they are in the world, they should, as a result of coming to our site, feel as though they are standing in the foyer of the Cambridge theatre in Covent Gardens and waiting to see the grease musical.

We need to capture the essence that will make people want to go further, not knowing what they will expect, yet making it easily navigable, and direct. The achievement of these key ingredients will be our critical success factor.

Market�s are very impersonal things, they do not help the designer figure out who he / she should really aim the potential of the site to. The designers need to know about the real people who will be using their site: who they are, what they like, what are their hobbies, etc. Therefore, we need adequate profiling of our customer base. This is usually achieved by listening to the current customer base, or to send out questionnaires. It is usually best call a market-research firm and ask how we can work together to profile the customers for the site.

After carrying out extensive market research identify our market for our service. We surveyed and gave out questionnaires to people in London and students at and the London area about their thoughts and ideas of our proposed multimedia production. A high percentage of potential users said that they thought our idea was good and they would use our service when deciding to go to the theatre to find out about what's on and where. Research shows that there is demand for our Virtual Theatre Guide.

There are currently many sites on the Internet that provide similar services that Switchblade will offer, however we feel that our proposed production will be successful because of its virtualisation. The various sites that we reviewed all lacked true range of multimedia technology. To make our site unique and interesting we aim to incorporate sound, animation, movement, high quality content and sense of actually being at the theatre.

Market research has allowed us to segment and target our market and determine who our most likely users will be. We have also been able to determine our advertising and promotion techniques.

The most appropriate method of segmenting our market will be according to demographics, which is segmenting the market according to:

  • Age - it presumed the majority of our users would be between the ages of 18 to 55.

  • Gender - both male and females will be using our service.

  • Occupation - the market segment for our product and service will be mainly students, professional people working in computer related jobs, working in offices.

  • Family lifestyle - Our service is available to everyone and anyone that has access to the Internet, people that love going to the theatre, living in and around London, tourists, and in the future users who have access to a CD-ROM.

  • Social class and income - we are targeting high-income earners and the middle-class.

  • As well as the above, event planners, promoters, booking agencies, local press, and people browsing the �net may also find our site useful.

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Our target audience in anyone that has access to the Internet and those people that love going to the theatre. The size of our market will be very wide, as the site will be accessible by anyone in the world with access to the Internet. However the main people will be users living in and around London, tourists and students.

We have decided to use a variety of methods to conduct the promotion of our service to ensure that we gain high visibility. A high portion of our users will be made up of Internet users therefore using Internet web page advertisements will be our main form of promotion. This would mean the designing of a web page banner advertisement, which could then be sent to appropriate web sites for inclusion on their site. Such sites could include search engines and sites of other related services. By placing a banner on search engines such Yahoo, Alta-Vista, Excite, Time Out, MSN Home, AOL Home and Webcrawler to name a few, Theatre On-line hope to capture a great number of people who use the web. The reason for using search engines to advertise is due to the millions of people who use search engines to help them find their way around the web. We can ensure our site banner will be brought up each time a person uses anyone of the search engines to navigate around the web.

We also aim to advertising our site/service by producing leaflets and posters, which can be displayed at tourist information offices, theatres, cinema, libraries, universities etc.

Promotion will also take place in the form of special offers, which will be advertised, on the site. An example of a special offers could be a theatre discounts for users that visit our site. Switchblade Design expect that this will incentive to users using our service will come back on a regular basis.

To become the market leader in this field by providing excellent service through high quality web pages. Assuming the tender is accepted Switchblade Designs can maintain the site by using the latest technologies available. We also aim to monitor competitors site in order to retain a good market share and continue to capture wide range of users.

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