Accuweather Marketing Plan

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In the clouds

Chris Patti – Vice President of Technology, declared that they wanted to bring data closure to the end users and he was worried that they „would have to spend a lot of money to construct its on-premises infrastructure” (Microsoft Customers). Instead, he found the technical solution to deliver the content from the cloud on the Windows Azure. The in-house development of the platform was easily managed and helped improving the scalability and the access to real-time weather data. After the migration to the new solution, AccuWeather can respond to 17 billion requests every day, which is triple than in 2012. The cloud computing services allows the company to do big data analysis with very little effort to bring-out the infrastructure. Analyses can provide information about where the users are coming from, where the traffic patterns are and who are the primarily users. The world is changing more and more by computer driven and machine learning and it is important to produce forecasts to help businesses to move forward with their technologies. “The application programming interfaces connected on the platform allow integrating more data bases and functionalities: device sensors, radar feeds, etc. Also, the services are delivered in more languages and more devices can be connected in real-time”. (KPMG)

ERP & CRM

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management software applications (CRM)” (Microsoft Dynamics). CRM is helping to get real-time weather, thanks to its business intelligence which is reducing the interval of processing the data from weeks to days, and from days to real-time. Big part of the activity of AccuWeather is consulting the Fortune 500 companies and it is important that the sales teams are fast in delivery of the accurate analysis. On the other hand, Microsoft Dynamics is very adjustable and plenty of products can be easily integrated without changing workflows. Through this, AccuWeather also created a central hub where the sales teams can find all the products in one place and being more efficient in front of the customers. In addition, the sales force can work now remotely and get access to the systems easily and to real-time guidance for business decisions. (Microsoft Customers)

AccuWeather – A Pathfinder Company?

Weather forecasting system market was estimated at $1.43 billion in 2014 and expected to growth to $1.99 billion by 2020. There are plenty of weather companies nowadays which are using systems to calculate historical data, create algorithms to make the weather forecast more accurate and deliver weather scenarios to various companies worldwide.

AccuWeather has been a company ready to embrace new technology and the industry itself requires daily the improvement of mathematical and statistical reports about weather and better manipulation of the data. AccuWeather was declared a pathfinder in digital technologies, taking the risk of detecting and adopting innovative solutions in order to gain competitive advantage. Comparing to other companies from the same industry, AccuWeather has a small number of employees, only 400, but offering services all around the world by using the latest technologies and sending the information to the end-users on various devices.

On the other hand, another relevant player in the market is The Weather Company (TWC). Their core business is a blend of technology, science and data, similar to AccuWeather. Until 2015, The Weather Company was seen as a heatseeker in the digital technologies, the company was struggling to search for trendy solutions, rather than analyzing which technologies would fit better on its business model. The organization started the collaboration with IBM for cloud services and finally in 2015, IBM bought the digital parts of The Weather Company. This acquisition will possibly disrupt the whole weather forecasting system market in 2017. The Weather Company and IBM combined business data, weather data and data from Internet of Things (IoT) to transform enterprise decision making. As a result of the acquisition, they expanded together and they are now present in 2.2 billion weather forecast locations, 140.000 weather stations, connected more than 40 million devices and get atmospheric data from 50.000 flights every day. (Miller) The Weather Company will use the ultra-intelligent cognitive machine of IBM – Watson and big data to recognize patterns which were until now undetectable, deriving a competitive advantage out of that.

Gaps in Business innovation

Desperate decisions

By maintaining their leading position in innovation, AccuWeather tried to quickly extend their operating model, but still using the same technology. The organization extended the range of the forecast to 90 days and it was a total failure. Instead of adapting their business model to the market and become more agile with the technology, as The Weather Company did, AccuWeather “forced” their systems to estimate how the weather would be in 90 days, without guaranteeing any precision of the information. In April 2016, the new option of checking how the weather would be in the following 90 days was introduced despite the meteorologists` warnings that weather cannot be predicted for a bigger period than 10 days. This new option was totally unscientific; the longer forecast period of AccuWeather was 45 days.

Generally, a digital business model has three main pillars: content, experience and platform. Unfortunately, out of these 3 pillars, AccuWeather used the same data platform for different contents. Even if the IT solutions of the organization were very advanced and could generate tailored analysis, the anxious decision of delivering new content to the data consumers didn’t bring any value. Customers are complaining that the information for the following 85-90 days is misleading and doesn’t help them to make future plans based on the weather forecast. (Mike Wehner)

Instead, when analyzing the mobile phone applications offered by AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, both applications have pro and cons, like:

- The Weather Channel allows customers to save favorite weather alerts or favorite travel routes

- AccuWeather informs customers about the risk of ice or thunderstorms, but it doesn’t cover the entire world; it is also integrated with social networks

On the other hand, The Weather Company collaborates with Apple, Google and other innovative players in the market to advertise and make