Marketing and Electronic Commerce

What can be done with the web part 2?

  1. Branding
  2. Market Research
  3. Entertainment

Branding

Branding is a very important aspect of marketing. Getting consumers to associate your brand name with quality in your market place is very important. You want consumers to consider your product first when they are making buying decisions, the strength of your brand name will help determine how consumers do consider your product when making those decisions. Marketers use traditional media to strengthen the brand name. They run discrete advertisements that they hope will reach the desired audience and be part of a broader advertising program that helps strengthen the brand name. WWW allows marketers to interact with the consumers. Consumers can enjoy an experience when they visit a marketer's web-site, this experience should have some impact on the development of the brand name for each individual consumer as s/he associates the name with the quality of experience. Rather than simply trying to target your customers and sending them information (the traditional model) you can offer each customer a unique experience. The quality of the experience should translate into the value of the brand equity (the value of the brand to the marketer).

Market Research

WWW is a medium that allows marketers to perform primary and secondary research. Secondary research (research of information originally gathered for other purposes) on WWW can include accessing sites like Madalyn and doing some business research by following the appropriate links. Conducting specific keyword searches on the major search engines would be another example of using WWW for secondary research.

Marketers can also conduct primary research (original research designed specifically to satisfy the current informational needs) by hosting surveys for WWW browsers to complete. Although the survey results are going to be biased because of the demographic skew of the WWW population, it is perhaps a very quick method of getting consumer feedback for a new product. Like other aspects of WWW marketing, the WWW survey is "demand pull", thus the marketer has to "drive" survey respondents to the survey.

Research data can also be gathered from the WWW log files. Learning what aspects of your site are the most popular, and what path consumers take through your site, can become very valuable marketing information.

Entertainment

Developing a business model for a WWW site for entertainment has proved to be an elusive goal for many. The Spot is such an example that has run into financial difficulty. While the interactive nature of WWW should allow for creative entertainment there are real issues that are slowing growth of entertainment on WWW.

Other media are very good for entertainment. Most of it is passive (listening to music, watching TV) entertainment. Passive entertainment is also very desirable for most consumers, interactivity requires work on the consumers' behalf.

There are examples of interactive entertainment to satisfy that market, Sega and Nintendo are two examples. For WWW to become a medium for interactive entertainment it will need to be able to offer a unique interactive experience. Perhaps the ability to allow two (or more) remote users enter a contest with each other is an example.

The technology infrastructure is not as robust as perhaps it needs to be for more creative interactive entertainment. Other issues that have impacted the adoption of WWW to the general population will also slow the adoption of WWW as an entertainment medium.

Many sites do use entertainment as a method of attracting (and keeping) an audience at a site for other marketing purposes. Thus the goal of the entertainment is to drive and keep customers at the site to expose them to the products of the marketers. This similar to using an entertaining advertisement in traditional media. Use the entertainment to capture the attention of the audience. While you have the attention, you hope the product name and the marketing message is communicated to the audience.