Patent Case Analysis (Case Study Sample)

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Patents: A Case Analysis
A patent is an exclusive right given to a person by the state for an invention and it grants the holder the right to exclude others from making or using the invention without the patent owner‘s consent. For an innovation to be patented it must meet relevant requirements such as novelty, non-obviousness and usefulness. This essay shall discuss on patent number 6070147 named Customer Identification and Marketing Analysis Systems. It was invented by Brent Harms and Kurt Johnson and was patented on May 30th 2000.
This invention relates to frequent-buyer marketing programs through the capture of buyer information from national identification cards in connection with marketing applications. This program tracks the buying habits of the customers at a given retail store. It involves introduction of identification terminal in the retail store such as programmable electronic devices with computing and data storage capabilities. This terminal will read the identification card and hence retain the buyer‘s information such as types of commodities bought, the date of visit and the amount purchased. It will hence be easy to know when this customer comes again. The loyalty marketing requirement is stored in the database and these criteria must be met in order to be awarded. An example of such criteria is through earning of points. This terminal will award points to the buyer every time he returns and when they reach a certain number, the buyer may be able to redeem them for some form of promotion such as purchase discounts, vouchers or even gifts. This will encourage the buyer to come again and loyalty marketing which is usually the aim of many businesses will be achieved.
This patent aims at bringing businesses to light through introduction of a cost-effective administration of regular buyer incentive programs. Earlier before, such a program would have been administered through creation of database from manually created forms about the customers. It would also need extra personnel to keep and update these records. This made business owners reluctant to practice loyal marketing programs due to high expenses, wastage of time and since construction of database was done manually, it would provide inaccurate information. This patent therefore will bring a system which has more efficiency in administration of frequency marketing programs without having to incur very high costs and also with greater participation from the customers.
In conclusion, this patent will help many businesses to implement successful frequent-buyer programs which help the business to get higher sales, create competitive advantage and also attract new customers. It will also assist in cutting down their expenses especially advertising costs. Past customers are usually the most responsive market segment because they already have information concerning the advertiser in ter...