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It’s rightly said that one of the biggest factors which ensures that any marketing campaign is a success is a good product to be marketed! A Marketer will consider his job half done if he has a quality product to market.

So before you start planning to chalk out your budget for marketing for your online venture, make sure you have a strong blueprint to get a successful product on hand.

Treat your online presence as if it’s a place in the real world. Then think how you would go about planning and preparing if you had to get a home or a shop built in the physical world. Believe me, the basic checklist remains the same, be it your home sweet home on the Earth or your website on www!

1) Once you have decided whether you need a Bungalow, a penthouse or a Flat the first thing you start looking for is a good location. (I will leave ‘what you need part to you. You are the best judge for what you need!). Similarly once you have decided what niche you want to be in or what business you want to start on the web, you will need to search for a good location, i.e. a good and reliable Hosting Service provider. Make a list of what service you would need, how many email accounts, how much web traffic you expect, etc. Then compare some of the service providers and select a good plan. Don’t fret to invest marginally more for good quality. It’s not everyday that you buy hosting service. And you won’t want to change it every now and then.

2) After finalizing the locality and land, you get down to the blueprint, the map or the drawing of the building (whatever you may call it), the actual layout. You may take help of an architect if you want a detailed drawing.
Similarly, once you have your hosting space done and you are ready for the work on putting into shape your website idea, get an outline of the website done. Take care of factors like the number of pages you want, how are you going to handle the navigation, basically the site map. Leave the beauty part out here. Colors, theme and the visual appeal will appear later.

3) After the architect gets your building blueprint ready, the actual brick and mortar work starts. On the website front that’s the actual coding. One thing to note here: If you are a business person or a non techie, leave the implementation details to your developer. Let him decide what’s best for you : PHP, ASP, joomla or drupal. You don’t tell the construction guy how thick the steel rods should be or what grade cement should be used. He knows it best.

4) Now that your home has a shape and you know how it’s coming up, you start taking care of the finishing, the interiors. What color goes best, should it be white, peach, you know that best. It’s your walls, your taste. Same goes with the website. Keeping some basic principles in mind choose your pages color, the font, the sidebars, the top bars’ colors. What banner goes best with your service or product, your tag line etc.

5) When its all done, its time for celebration, time to invite people, your near and dear ones, your colleagues to your place for housewarming or for just showing off ! This is the ‘internet marketing’ part. But before you do that you should make sure that things at your home are in place, its appealing to the visitors. This translates to the basic on- page SEO to please the Google bots! Ideally this part should be taken care of during the coding phase.

Spend time and efforts on building your product and take my word: You would enjoy the marketing part.

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In the last post, I referred to Brand Identity prism by Kapferer which could be used to determine the brand identity of a product. In this post, the model will be looked closely to understand the nuances and its application.

Before the application of any model, few obvious questions which come to our mind are:-

 What is it?

 When should it be used?

 How to use it?

Now suppose if a product or a brand (taking the liberty of equating product with brand ) was a person, how would he look like? What traits would he have? Would he be warm, cold, aggressive, approachable or smart?

Brand identity prism helps us provide answers to these questions.

Ok so the next logical question is when to use it?

I would say practically everywhere. Understanding of the identity would help design your web presence better, would decide the positioning and have an effect on all marketing collaterals.

The best way to understand the model is to call up a meeting of all department heads and ask questions, lot of questions.

The prism looks something like this:-

As is clearly visible, the model has 6 dimensions on which a brand is to be evaluated.

Physical Facet talks about what the product is, what does it do, how does it add value to customers, how does it fill up the gap in the market.

Brand personality is measured using those traits/features of consumer personality that are directly related to brands. Proper care should be taken not to confuse it with consumer’s reflection.  Brand personality is closely linked with self image and image of the consumer. Questions to be asked are:

 1)    What are the features of consumer personality?

 2)    What are the features of brand if it was a person? This depends on the functional aspect of the product and the gap it would fill.

Brand Culture: As the name signifies, it talks about the culture of the brand. The values and the principles will follow from the culture and it is these values which will bind the customers. Remember HSBC’s “The World’s local bank”.

Questions which need to be asked:-

 1)    Is the brand’s culture global?

2)    What are the values for which the brand stands for?

3)    How would customers take the values of such a brand?

Brand Relationships: No prizes for guessing what would this be about! Yes, after all every brand has to maintain healthy relationships with customers. All marketing collaterals are intended to do just that. Therefore to gauge the identity, this had to feature.

 1)    How would Sales describe the relationship attributes for their customer management process?

2)    How would Customer support describe their approach to increasing customer satisfaction?

3) How does the brand want to be seen by customers in marketing communication?

Customer Reflection: Every product is designed to satisfy some need of the intended customer base. A consumer has to be reflected in a way, which would show how he or she could image himself consuming a particular good. For example, in India anyone consuming Pepsi Cola would imagine himself to be young and Thums up (another cola drink from Coke stable) to be adventurous. For this aspect, questions are to be put to customer experience team about What would the users imagine while using the product?

Customer Self Image: Consumers get attracted to those brands in which they see their own traits, for example, a man who is muscular and strong would smoke Marlboro. This goes hand in hand with brand personality.

All the dimensions on the left side are external factors whereas the right side represents internalization.  I know it is a bit tedious but am sure if applied correctly it can reap huge benefits for corporate.

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I read somewhere in a Philip Kotler’s marketing book that the smallest and the simplest definition of marketing is “meeting needs profitably”. Therefore the process starts from identification of needs, designing a product or service which contains requisite features and then the exchange of the same. The exchange will leave all the parties involved in the transaction better off i.e. a win-win game and not win-lose game.

For both (assuming there are only 2 parties involved, although there could be more than 2 as well) the parties to gain from the transaction, it is important or rather essential that both see some value proposition in the exchange. Due to its extreme importance in the business, the concept of value proposition is taught in every B-School. Every marketer, every business man, every CEO swears by it. They always talk about adding value to their share holders and stake holders.

But does the concept hold any relevance at SME (Small and medium enterprises) level? Do they also understand so called Value Proposition?

Recently I met with one of my friends. He has skates manufacturing unit in Noida (a suburb of Delhi). He happened to mention that he would like to have web presence for his business. We readily offered our (my friend as well) services but he mentioned that the final decision had to be taken by his father, who was running the business. He also warned us that his father is a tough nut to crack as many SEO consultants have found out earlier. So we decided to meet his father to explain to him the benefits of internet marketing and internet at large.

After an hour discussion, we were able to convince his father about the benefits of internet marketing and got the final approval. My friend was ecstatic and surprised as to how did we pull it off!

The answer is simple.

“Value Proposition”

Yes, we tried to show him the value which he would derive out of internet marketing instead of talking about Meta tags, keywords, alternate tags etc. which previous SEO companies did. We understood a very elementary thing that at the end of day, it is the extra business which he is interested in and not “search engine visibility”. He does not see value in being top on Google or Yahoo but generating that extra revenue.

So after this whole experience, I can safely say that yes the concept of “value proposition” is universal, exists even at Small scale level and will never lose its importance

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Customer Segmentation is a common jargon in marketing. It is said that every company should first segment its customers, choose the target segment and then aim to satisfy their needs. With Internet gaining ground and becoming the ‘the’ way of doing business, it becomes imperative for companies and internet marketers to understand the consumer behavior. Prior to any marketing efforts on internet, one should know the answers to the following question.

Do I know know how to segment the customers on the basis of their internet usage pattern?

Or

Are “All users are equal for me” ?

If you don’t have this primary information, there are good chances that your efforts do not produce the desired results, no matter how effective they were for others or how hard you try.How should you go about this task ?The answer is being provided by a study conducted by Mckinsey and Media Metrix which identifies internet consumer segmentation for the first time on their usage patterns.According to the study, the different categories are:

1) Simplifiers “End-to-End” Convenience seeking people. They spend on an average 7 hours per month but have the longest tenure online(49% have been online for over 5 years). Therefore if an internet marketer wants to have sustained sales from this segment, they must provide end-to-end convenience such as ease of access, availability of information etc.

2) Surfers Logs in with a specific purpose in mind- buying gifts for example. According to the study, they constitute 8% of the active user population but account for 32% of the online time.To attract and keep Surfers, a site needs cutting-edge design and features, constant updates, a strong online brand, and an assortment of products and services.

3) Connectors As the name implies,they use the internet to connect with people through different means like email, chat etc. Although Connectors account for 36% of the active user population, 40% of them have been online less than two years, and just 42% have made purchases online (versus an average of 61%). Connectors may count on offline brands they trust to lead them to appealing content and hence Companies with strong offline presences will have the advantage in reaching these beginners.

4) Bargainers These people are driven by quest for deals. 52% of eBay visitors is constituted by this category. To extract sales from this segment, the site must not only appeal to them on rational level but also on emotional level, satisfying their need for competitive pricing, the excitement of the “search,” and the desire for community.

5) Routiners They primarily go to internet for information. As the name implies these folks are routine visitors who are suckers for news. These people visit fewer domains but spend almost twice the time per page than others do. Routiners want superior content and the sense they are getting “something special.”

6) Sportsters Uses internet mainly for sports and entertainment related information. They spend on an average of 7.1 hours( versus 9.8 average). The challenge for companies is to turn this use into revenue, usually by moving visitors from “free” content to a paid subscription.As it is clear from the study that each consumer has different needs and usage pattern thereby giving rise to a different behavior. And therefore the knowledge of these behaviors provide an advantage to online marketers to target their customers in a much better optimized manner.

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