Branding and Positioning

Pay-per-click advertisements on major search engines, direct mail and e-mail campaigns, trade journal advertisements, or e-newsletters to customers and targeted potential customers would be a way for ABC to create a powerful brand awareness campaign, while positioning itself in key areas where potential customers are most likely to find it and become a qualified lead. Next, ABC must look at its internal realties. That is to say, it must ask itself key fundamental questions regarding the way it does business internally and what connections it must make on the outside to secure competitive advantages in the future.

Internal Realities

ABC must answer many questions about its internal realities. It must answer how it plans to integrate Internet leads into its CRM program. It must also answer how it plans on tracking these leads into profits once they are entered into the back-office accounting system. Some companies combine the two systems into what is known as an ERP or enterprise resource planning system. Some companies take it a step further and add trends analysis information and other information into one central database called a knowledge management system.

Sizing Up the Competition

ABC must answer what it means to be a customer-focused company. It must answer questions regarding product pricing, placement, inventory, distribution, competition analysis and ethical concerns such as security and privacy issues. One point to keep in mind when studying the competition is to pay close attention to how the competitor structures its products and services while analyzing the following areas of the competition:

• Technical
• Sales
• Distribution
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Financial
• Legal

This information should be used to plan for the future with ones' competition in mind. Relationship analysis effectively drives more intelligence into strategic decision making, which will give one’s company a competitive edge. Understanding how one’s competitors relate to and work with other organizations provides a more accurate picture of one’s competitive landscape. Finally, ABC needs to measure the effectiveness of its efforts and answer whether or not it accomplished its strategic goals.

ABC believes it can accomplish these strategic goals by advertising in horizontally integrated e-marketplaces and by optimizing its website for content and backward linkage to increase its web page ranking and popularity with the major search engines.   ABC must answer which marketplaces will drive its target market to its website. Business-to-Business marketplaces like ThomasNet, Global Spec, Vert-Markets and similar horizontally integrated e-marketplaces could offer relevant lead generation for ABC. ABC must also answer the question of which advertising methods would offer the best brand awareness opportunities for the company. 

ABC could look towards various brokerage models when determining the appropriate marketing mix. Brokerage models are used to bring buyers and sellers together in an effort to establish business connections between them in order to form a mutually agreeable transaction. One example of a brokerage model is a search agent. Search agents attempt to take the user’s query, or criteria, for a specific good or service and find the best provider or best price for the user. Examples of brokerage models are, as mentioned above, e-marketplaces. E-marketplaces have many companies that advertise on their sites. When the user enters their criteria, the system selects the best company to fulfill the needs of the user. 

Another example of a brokerage model is the auction broker. Auction brokers do not get involved in the transaction, they simply take a percentage of the sales commission or require a small listing fee to list products or services on it site. An example of an auction broker would be E-bay. E-bay has a section of its website dedicated to the small business. ABC could look here in an attempt to procure auction brokerage business while getting rid of excess inventory.

A further example of a brokerage model business is the distributor. Distributor sites serve as an online catalog and lead generating tool for their advertisers. An example of a B2B online distributor would be ThomasNet’s online catalog of industrial manufacturers and distributors. ABC must also question how it wants to create brand awareness throughout the industry.

In the next post, we will discuss branding and positioning for our fictional company.

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