Do Business Well

Leadership first, perception second. To try to reverse this sequence is almost impossible.

What if you do everything right? What if you are the first in a new category and subsequently go on to dominate that category domestically? Then you should try to expand the market in the U.S. at the same time that you take your brand to the global market.

Coca-Cola did all of these things. But what’s next? Are there no second acts in branding history? Continue Reading »

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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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A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »

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One of the unique characteristics of doing business online is the ability it gives you to measure and track the success of your marketing programs. Yet success, as we have seen, can be difficult to define. At the center is the continuous-feedback loop of tracking, measuring, seeking insight, and informing the program— a process based on both science and art. Science because we apply analytic techniques to the huge amounts of data and information in order to structure it and understand our customers‘ responses and behaviors. Art because lasting program success also depends on creative, out-of-the-box program design and interpretation inspired by the insight that we gather from the data. Continue Reading »

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The issue of digital trademark and copyright protection has become a hornet’s nest since the commercialization of the World Wide Web. You need to register a domain name if you want to do business on the World Wide Web. Network Solutions, which handles the registration of domain names, has been doling them out on a first-come, first-serve basis, regardless of who owns the trademark. But now that companies are waking up to the commercial potential of the Web, they are screaming foul if the name they want has been taken by someone else, especially if they have a federal trademark protecting the name. Continue Reading »

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13. Java portal. This is a different form of portal, where you do not have to visit the portal but instead content is downloaded in line with your preferences. Avant Go! uses this technique to download content while a smartphone is being synchronized with a PC.

14. Mobile search. All the main search providers have mobile (WAP)-specific versions of their search engines. These are now becoming more sophisticated. Google Mobile search (www.google.co.uk/mobile) offers Local search to find a local business, and will then display a map (Google Maps is integrated) or phone number with the option of click-to-call on the appropriate handset. Google Local uses listings from Yell.com.

15. Mobile music. Beyond ringtones, many handsets are now designed to play and store MP3 music files and potentially rival the iPod — although we now have an iPod mobile version. As access speeds increase, tunes may be offered in promotions. Continue Reading »

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Shoppers wanting to get their caffeine fix online at www.starbucks.com now have only one path to take when they pay for their beans. If they are already registered with Passport, Microsoft’s new identity-verification program, they can use it to complete their purchase. If not, they are directed to a site where they can sign up for Passport. Passport is being marketed as a ‘one-click’ solution to obtaining access to Web sites requiring registration and to make purchases over the Internet.This means that shoppers cannot buy their coffee without letting Microsoft be part of the transaction. Starbucks used to let shoppers pay for their purchases by credit card, but in May 2001 it joined fifty other affiliated sites and switched to Passport. Now the personal information of every Starbucks.com buyer is stored in Microsoft’s vast database. Continue Reading »

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In the ‘post-dotcom’ era, one of the most important lessons learned by the survivors is that it takes more than a flashy Web site to succeed. It depends on a good business plan, promotion, focused customer service and an efficient distribution system. It also helps to be connected to a strong and trusted brand. When famous designer Ralph Lauren decided to launch his Polo brand on the Internet (www.polo.com), he joined forces with NBC (the National Broadcasting Co.), NBC.com and ValueVision Fulfilment services. Each of the partners brought its own specialism to the venture: Ralph Lauren supplies the product and the name recognition, NBC provides promotion on its networks and the Internet, and ValueVision handles distribution and customer service. The new venture went from birth to fulfilment in nine months and distributes a wide range of products, including clothing for men, women and children, as well as Ralph Lauren’s home collection. The state-of-the-art distribution centre was designed with versatility in mind, down to the last detail. Even the packaging design has a strong emphasis on customer care and branding. As explained by Howard Fox, Senior Vice President of ValueVision, ‘This isn’t just a normal pick-pack operation; Ralph Lauren takes a lot of pride in its packaging. It’s part of their imaging and branding.’ An efficient returns system is an important component to any dotcom. Polo.com is recognizing that the returns process is an extension of its customer care. Only about 10 per cent of all ordered items are actually returned. This is about half the average industry percentage for clothing-based distributors. It is also less than Polo.com originally expected. Continue Reading »

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