Do Business Well

But everybody wants to grow, and you can’t blame them. So what should an Internet brand like Amazon.com do? There are five fundamental branding strategies for a leader in any category.

1. Keep your brand focused.

There are more than 5 million dotcom sites registered on the Internet, and you want your site to stand for more than one thing? Amazon.com should stay focused on books and music CDs. After all, the site accounts for just 4 percent of the $24.6 billion book market in the United States. Continue Reading »

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Amazon.com used to use the theme “Earth’s Biggest Book‑store.” No longer. They’ve changed it. The new theme is “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”

Person of the year Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, says, “It’s very natural for a customer to wonder, can you really be the best place to buy music, books and electronics? In the physical world, the answer is almost always no. But on the Internet all the physical constraints go away.” (A sign of the times: The company recently registered “Amazoneverywhere.net as a Website name.) Continue Reading »

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The biggest mistake of all is believing you can do anything.

Success in business doesn’t just show up on the bottom line of the profit-and-loss column; it also goes to the top. Success in business inflates the egos of top management.

Supremely successful companies believe they can do anything. They can launch any product into any market. They can make any merger work. It’s just a question of having the willpower and the resources to throw into the task. “What is it that we want to do?” is the question that management usually asks itself. Continue Reading »

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Despite the disadvantages and the dotcom crash, the advantages are driving a growth in e-Shopping in the UK, at least in certain categories. Sales had reached £3.3 billion by 2001. It was forecast that ‘most people’ will buy groceries, books, CDs and even clothes by e-Shopping, making up 10 per cent of total shopping by 2009. It has been forecast that 94- per cent of e-Retailing will be at the expense of the high street, with only 6 per cent arising from incremental growth (Gibson 1999; Prefontayne 1999; RICS Foundation 2000; Verdict 2000, 2001, 2002).

According to Verdict, in 2001 grocery would account for half of all e-Sales — £1.3 billion, which sounds massive, but accounts for only 5.6 per cent of groceries. The market leaders in their sectors were Amazon (books, plus CDs and videos), Tesco (groceries), Dell (computers) and Next (clothing). Average spend has risen faster for men (+15 per cent) than women (+5 per cent), leading Verdict to comment that ‘the proliferation of female-orientated sites . . . have failed to motivate women to shop significantly more’. Continue Reading »

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`Place’ (Convenience in the 4- Cs) means the elements of the marketing mix that marketers use to enable customers to access the benefits of a product or service. Traditionally, this has meant ‘channels of distribution‘ through (e.g.) various wholesaler and retailer combinations. Viewing from the ‘convenience for the customer‘ (4-Cs) perspective gives a more customer-orientated focus. This is a vital decision area for the e-Business for three reasons. First, relatively small local companies can widen their market and even export (e.g. Botham (www.Botham.co.uk), to be described further in Chapter 9). Second, many e- Businesses aim to gain competitive advantage by using e-Systems to de-layer the distribution chain. For example, Dell (www.dell.co.uk) supplies customers directly, rather than through distributors, wholesalers or retailers. Third, distribution is an area where some e-Businesses have been severely criticized for failing to deliver customer service (see Chapter 9 for more details).

Place elements of the marketing mix have been changing rapidly over recent decades, and these changes impact in many ways on the marketing operations of the e-Business. First, the growth of retailer power has involved major retailers taking more control of their supply chains. The involvement of wholesalers has been reduced, tending to give way to contract logistics (under retailer control). At the same time, supply chains have become more efficient, with computer network links between suppliers and retailers — many still based on EDI. Predating the Internet, EDI is based on privately owned third-party computer networks. Stock levels have been reduced using techniques such as JIT and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Control of the physical distribution, ordering, invoicing and payment systems, particularly for major retailers, is often still carried out using EDI networks such as Tradanet (www.gegxs.com/gxs/ products/product/traser). Increasingly, though, retailers such as Tesco are allowing Internet access to their suppliers for real-time electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) data. Trusted supplier partners can thus respond more quickly to changes in customer demand. Continue Reading »

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