Chapter 8
Strategies for Marketing, Sales, and
Promotion
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Creating an Effective Web
Presence
• Businesses always create a presence in the
physical world by building stores and office
buildings.
• The only contact that customers and other
stakeholders have with a firm on the Web is
through its presence there.
• Creating an effective Web presence can be critical
even for the smallest and newest firm operating on
the Web.
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Learning Objectives
In this chapter, you will learn about:
• Establishing an effective business presence
on the Web
• Promoting your Web site
• Meeting the needs of Web site visitors
• Creating trust and building loyalty in Web
site visitors
• Testing usability in Web site design
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Learning Objectives (Cont.)
• Identifying and reaching customers on the
Web
• Choosing successful marketing approaches
for the Web
• Understanding the elements of branding
• Considering branding strategies and costs
• Choosing a business model for selling on
the Web
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Identifying Web Presence Goals
• On the Web, businesses have the luxury of
intentionally creating a space that creates a
distinctive presence.
• A Web site can perform many image-creation
tasks very effectively, including:
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Serving as a sale brochure
Serving as a product showroom
Showing a financial report
Posting an employment ad
Serving as a customer contact point
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Achieving Web Presence Goals
• An effective site is one that creates an attractive
presence that meets the objectives of the business
or other organization.
• Possible objectives include:
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Attracting visitors to the Web site
Making the site interesting enough
Convincing visitors to follow the site’s links
Creating an impression of corporate image
Building a trusting relationship with visitors
Reinforcing positive images of the organization
Encouraging visitors to return to the site.
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The Toyota Site
• The Toyota site is a good example of an
effective Web presence.
• The site provides:
– A product showroom feature
– Links to detailed information about each
product line
– Links to dealers
– Links to information about company
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Quaker Oats
• Quaker Oats has created Web sites that did not
offer any corporate presence until 1999.
• In 1999, Quaker Oats changed its Web page to
improve its general appearance and userfriendliness.
• The Toyota and Quaker Oats examples illustrate
that the Web can integrate an opportunity for
enhancing the image of a business with the
provision of information.
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Not-for-Profit Organizations
• A key goal for many not-for-profit organizations is
information dissemination.
• The combination of information dissemination and
a two-way contact channel is a key element in any
Web site.
• The American Civil Liberties Union and American
Red Cross have created effective Web presences.
• Political parties and museums also use Web site
for their image presences.
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How the Web is Different
• The failure to understand how the Web is
different from other presence-building
media is one reason that businesses fail to
achieve their Web objectives.
• Firms must use the Web’s capability for
two-way, meaningful communication with
their customers.
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Meeting the Needs of Web Site
Visitors
• Businesses that are successful on the Web
realize that every visitor to their Web site is
a potential customer.
• Creating a Web site that meets the needs of
visitors with a wide range of motivations
can be challenging.
• Technology variation can be another
concern to Web presence.
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Meeting the Needs of Web Site
Visitors
• A good Web site should give the visitor the
option to select smaller versions of the
images.
• A good site design lets visitors choose
among information attributes, such as level
of detail, forms of aggregation, viewing
format, and downloading format.
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Trust and Loyalty
• When customers buy a product, they are also
buying that service element.
• A seller can create value in a relationship with a
customer by nurturing customers’ trust and
developing it into loyalty.
• Customer service is a problem for many corporate
sites.
• A primary weak spot for many sites is the lack of
integration between the companies’ call centers
and their Web sites.
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Usability Testing
• Firms are now starting to perform usability
testing to their Web sites.
• As the usability testing becomes more
common, more Web sites will meet their
goals.
• Eastman Kodak, T. Rowe Price, and Maytag
have found that a series of Web site test
designs help them a lot.
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Identifying and Reaching
Customers
• Two general ways of identifying and reaching
customers: personal contact and mass media.
• An important element of corporate Web presence
is connecting with site visitors who are customers
or potential customers.
• Mass media is a one-to-many communication
model, the Web is a Many-to-one communication
model, and personal contact is a one-to-one
communication model.
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Measuring the Effectiveness of
Web Site Advertising
• The pricing metric in mass media is called costper-thousand and is often abbreviated CPM.
• Measuring Web audiences is more complicated.
• Banner ads are often sold on a CPM basis where
the ‘thousand’ is 1000 impressions.
• Rates vary greatly and depend on how much
demographic information the Web site obtains
about its visitors, but most are within the range of
$1 to $100 CPM.
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New Marketing Approaches for
the Web
• The Web is an intermediate step between mass
media and personal contact.
• Using the Web to communicate with potential
customers offer many advantages of personal
contact selling and many of the cost savings of
mass media.
• GartnerGroup reported that customer-centered
marketing strategies would be an excellent fit for
the Internet marketplace.
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Technology-Enabled
Relationship Management
• Technology-enabled relationship
management occurs when a firm obtains
detailed information about a customer and
uses that information for marketing
purpose.
• It is also called customer relationship
management (CRM) or electronic customer
relationship management (eCRM).
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Creating and Maintaining Brands
on the Web
• A known and respected brand name can
present to potential customers a powerful
statement of quality and value.
• Branded products are easier to advertise and
promote, because each product carries the
reputation of the brand name.
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Elements of Branding
• The key elements of a brand are differentiation,
relevance, and perceived value.
• Product differentiation indicates that the company
must clearly distinguish its product from all others
in the market.
• Relevance is the degree to which the product
offers utility to a potential customer.
• Perceived value is a key element in creating a
brand that has value.
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Emotional Branding vs. Rational
Branding
• Companies have traditionally used
emotional appeals in their advertising and
promotion efforts to establish and maintain
brands.
• Rational branding relies on the cognitive
appeal of the specific help offered, not on a
broad emotional appeal.
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Permission Marketing Strategies
• Many businesses may send e-mail messages
to their customers and potential customers.
• The practice of sending e-mail messages to
people who have requested them is a part of
marketing strategy called permission
marketing.
• One Web site that offers opt-in e-mail
services is yesmail.com.
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Brand-Leveraging Strategies
• Rational branding is not the only way to
build brands on the Web.
• One method that is working for wellestablished Web sites is to extend their
dominant positions to other products and
services.
• Yahoo! is an excellent example of this
strategy.
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Affiliate Marketing Strategies
• In affiliate marketing, the affiliate firm’s Web site
includes descriptions, reviews, ratings, or other
information about a product that is linked to
another firm’s site that offers the item for sale.
• The affiliate site receives a commission.
• The affiliate site also obtains the benefit of the
selling site’s brand in exchange for the referral.
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Viral Marketing Strategies
• Viral marketing relies on existing customers
to tell other persons about the products or
services they have enjoyed using.
• Viral marketing approaches use individual
customers to spread the words.
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Brand Consolidation Strategies
• Another way to leverage the established
brands of existing Web sites was devised by
Della & James, an online bridal registry.
• Della & James offers a single registry that
connects to several local and national
department and gift stores, including
Crate&Barrel, Dillard’s, Gump’s, Neiman
Marcus and Williams-Sonoma.
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Cost of Branding
• Transferring existing brands to the Web or using
the Web to maintain an existing brand is much
easier and less expensive than creating an entirely
new brand on the Web.
• Promoting the company’s Web presence should be
an integral part of brand development and
maintenance.
• Integrating the URL with the company logo on
brochures can also be helpful.
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Web Site Naming Issues
• The legal and marketing aspects of Web site
naming can be complicated.
• Obtaining identifiable names to use for branded
products on the Web is important.
• URL brokers sell or auction domain names.
• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) maintains a list of accredited
domain name registrars.
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Selling Goods and Services
• The business model of selling goods and
services on the Web is based on the mail
order catalog business model.
• When the catalog model is expanded to the
Web site, it is called the Web-catalog model.
• Compaq, Dell, and Gateway are examples
of selling computers on the Web.
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Selling Information or Other
Digital Content
• Firms that own intellectual property have
embraced the Web as a new and highly efficient
distribution mechanism.
• ProQuest is a Web site that sells digital copies of
published documents.
• The ACM Digital Library offers subscriptions to
electronic versions of its journals to its members
and to libraries.
• Encyclopedia Britannica is an example that has
transferred an existing brand to the Web.
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Advertising-Supported Model
• The advertising-supported business model is the
one used by network television in the U.S.
• The success of Web advertising has been
hampered by two major problems:
– No consensus has emerged on how to measure and
charge for site visitor views
– Very few Web site have sufficient numbers of visitors
to interest large advertiser.
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Advertising-Subscription Mixed
Model
• In this mixed model, subscribers pay a fee
and accept some level of advertising.
• The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal use a mixed advertisingsubscription model.
• The Reuters wire service also uses a mixed
model in its Web offerings.
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Fee-for-Transaction Models
• The travel agency business model involves
receiving a fee for facilitating a transaction.
• Now, a number of online travel agencies
began doing business on the Web.
• Stock brokerage firms use a fee-fortransaction model. They charge their
customers a commission for each trade
executed.
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