book.chapter Adapting marketing mix for digital

Repackage for Online Channels Companies must adapt their products to align with the evolving landscape of digital sales channels. This involves reconfiguring products to ensure they are easy to customize and assemble, often behind the scenes, to provide a hassle-free consumer experience. Products should be designed to offer a seamless journey across both physical and digital platforms, allowing customers to research, try, order, and receive products in a cohesive manner. In the short term, businesses need to analyze changing customer behaviors and competitor strategies, as well as the technical demands of new sales channels. In the long term, products will require simplification, mass customization, dynamic pricing, creative bundling, hybrid distribution, and embedded customer service to stay competitive. By proactively adapting to these changes, companies can maintain a significant edge in the market as consumer behavior and technology continue to advance. Harness Online Market Power Online marketplaces are reshaping commerce by shifting power towards buyers, necessitating marketers to adapt strategies in pricing, channel management, and core marketing approaches. The appeal of these platforms lies in the variety of products and prices, transparent pricing, collective buying power, and the ease of switching sellers. Marketers must experiment with online marketplaces to keep pace with evolving buyer behavior, by assessing customer migration to these channels, selecting suitable marketplaces, and understanding the trade-offs between creating new platforms or joining existing ones. Successful marketplaces often possess unique data, category expertise, trustworthiness, volume, financing or sourcing capabilities, and significant market share. To avoid commoditization, companies should redefine value propositions and add services, faster delivery, and flexible pricing. In the long term, insights from online marketplaces should inform business growth, aligning online and offline sales channels, and avoiding conflicts. Companies can add value through innovative services like dispute resolution, inspection, escrow, and logistics support. Data from these platforms can also aid in forecasting supply and demand, benchmarking, and forming futures contracts or supply agreements. Develop Relevant Online Branding Marketers must adapt their branding strategies for new media, balancing physical and online presence. Online branding should be deliberate, leveraging innovations like viral marketing and personalization. Transitioning brands online requires evaluating factors such as first-mover advantage, web affinity, innovation reputation, product information richness, online brand experience translation, and domain name availability. Investments should target consumer online behaviors, focusing on search engine optimization, viral marketing, and affiliate networks. For long-term success, brands must create compelling online experiences to foster loyalty, blending offline and online interactions. Catering to Generation Y is crucial, as they respond to diverse media, viral programs, live events, digital entertainment, interactive marketing, and unique offerings. Online branding effectiveness should be measured with metrics to assess return-on-investment, like analyzing the success of interactive TV features that enable viewers to purchase products seen on-screen. Integrate Interactive Marketing Interactive direct marketing tools like targeted web marketing, email marketing, and online market research are more than just sales generators. They provide insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling marketers to anticipate and influence future purchases. Effective use of these tools improves customer relationships in measurable ways. As online shopping continues to grow, companies leveraging these technologies will have significant competitive edge. In the short-term, marketers should familiarize themselves with key interactive direct marketing tools: online promotions like coupons and sweepstakes; permission-based email campaigns; customer preference profiling; electronic upselling/cross-selling; self-service customer service portals; affiliate programs; online event sponsorships; web ads; customer relationship emails; e-newsletters; reminder services; viral marketing; and marketing automation platforms. Hands-on experience will reveal what works well and what doesn't. Longer-term, successfully integrating these tools requires building ROI models to quantify performance; managing the influx of customer data to quickly process, analyze, warehouse, and integrate into customer profiles; and negotiating control of customer data to facilitate appropriate third-party access while safeguarding against loss or theft. Specifically, each interactive campaign generates large volumes of customer responses that must be handled effectively. Marketers need to respond promptly; rapidly and accurately process data; analyze patterns and trends; store data for future use; integrate data into unified customer profiles; provide self-service customer support portals; and use data to inform future marketing efforts. Additionally, customer databases become valuable, transferable assets. Marketers should negotiate terms dictating third-party data access protocols and structures; outsourcing arrangements; and protections against unauthorized use or theft. Ownership of high-quality customer data confers competitive advantage in the age of interactive marketing.