Your site looks great ... but I`ll skip the aesthetics and try to address your questions/concerns about strategy. You wrote:
"I`m trying to stand out among traditional online promotional sites through branding and a unique customer experience."
This isn`t a bad strategy but it`s used by a lot of your competition. The value of any strategy is inversely proportional to the number of companies using the same or similar strategy. In this case, you have multiple levels of duplication throughout the industry: your strategy is already in wide use by your competition and so are your tactics. This makes it very difficult for you to actually differentiate your offering. In the mind of the prospect, the sea of similar companies is really a sea of commodity offerings.
To achieve meaningful differentation, you`ll have to start with a unique strategy. Otherwise, you`ll just be a beautifully dressed version of the same thing. Furthermore, this model makes it easier for price based competitors to strip away unimportant attributes - such as web site aesthetics - in exchange for lower prices.
If you are indeed offering a unique customer experience, I am not getting the message by visiting your site. The site is very corporate, very professional, very beautiful, but does not communicate uniqueness. A unique brand image is a component of differentiation but only if you can overcome the prospect`s perception that branded products are a commodity. Brand image doesn`t help when the customer doesn`t know the difference between Heinz and store-brand Ketchup.
Sometimes you have to block against the competition. How does Heinz do this? By running advertisements that say things like "Doesn`t your family deserve Heinz?" and so forth. But this is a purely tactical block, it does nothing to really differentiate between Heinz and store brand. However an advertisement like "Heinz Ketchup has more tomatoes and less sugar than store brand." is an example of communicating an aspect of meaningful - real/fundamental - differentiation. Ideally you should find three hard-to-duplicate aspects of meaningful differentiation and then use your web site to communicate - or block - the competition and reinforce your offer.
You could use a message like "Say thanks with an expensive gift." Your price-based competition is unlikely to want to move along this line and even if they do, you block again by saying "We sell exclusive products. Your customers will come to our website and see for themselves. They`ll know you spent the extra money to thank them for their business." So those are examples of using a different strategy - being expensive - to differentiate yourself meaningfully. I`m not sure if there are lots of companies offering expensive branded merchandise but this is just an example.
On the other hand, if you want to offer low-cost branded merchandise then you have to differentiate but not on price alone. This will get you absolutely nowhere and there is no point to using a brand to justify high prices if price is an attribute on which you wish to compete. You could offer a selection of "cooler, trendier" merchandise and use an exclusive contract with your supplier in exchange for giving them your business [ and not their competition ]. You could also source really unique, low-cost items.
Anyway... to wrap this up... if you`re using the same strategy to sell the same products, you can only achieve surface differentation, which leads to customers who shop for the best price. This might work in the short term but not in the long term unless you can design your operation to compete on price and do large volume with good/great margins. Most people won`t care if your website is "cool" or if your corporate image is "cool and abstract and fresh" unless you give them a reason to do so.
CookieMonster2007-6-19 0:23:12
New Topic
Post Reply
Follow Topic
