E-marketing Dell gets closer to it’s customers

415

Chapter 8 E-marketing

Real-world E-Business experiences The Econsultancy interview Steve Nicholas, Assistant Director of E-commerce at Guess Overview and main concepts covered Steve talks about the challenges of multi-channel retailing, especially for a well-known global brand in the fashion sector and one that has both wholesale and retail busi- nesses to think about. The interview Q. Can you summarise where Guess is in terms of multi-channel retail? Steve Nicholas, Guess: In terms of multi-channel, we’re really in a good place from a merchandising and inventory perspective, because of the way we are set up. We’re set up with virtual inventory that is tied to our e-commerce site and retail stores, so we get an initial allocation that’s strictly for e-commerce and can pull from a reserve in our North American warehouse. The warehouse ships out about 80 of its merchandise to the stores and holds back around 20 for replenishment. E-commerce can pull from that 20 for hot selling items and quickly push out to our stores any not so hot selling items that may have been included in the initial e-commerce-only allocation. In our US stores, we also have a store portal or merchandise locator, which store personnel can use to order from the website in the store. If a store does not have a particular size or colour, we can accommodate that customer’s order through the e-commerce site, from the store register. So in terms of inventory, we’re in a solid position to accommodate the customer from a multi-channel perspective. From a broader, assortment perspective, we have a debate going on about whether the e-commerce site should represent ‘Guess – the brand’ or ‘Guess – the retail stores’. If you go to Guess.com and want to buy shoes, do you expect to see all the shoes that Guess as a company markets through its wholesale, licensee and retail businesses or just the shoes we are currently selling in our retail stores? It’s a question of strategy really. Q. How does that affect how you market products online? Have you set up your site primarily as a place for consumers to research products, before buying in-stores? Steve Nicholas, Guess: Sure. Our website is a shop window for the latest and greatest products that we have available in our North American retail stores. We use a company called Foresee Results, which creates custom online visitor surveys and matches up the data with the American Consumer Satisfaction Index to compare our visitors’ satisfaction with that of the satisfaction of visitors to other websites. We continually rank near the top in terms of multi-channel satisfaction scores. From the surveys, we have visibility – we know that 69 of the people browsing on our site have made two or more purchases in our stores during the last year and 37 have made five or more. They view our site as an online catalogue to see what the new items are, and then go to the store to try it on and purchase. Q. Have you found affiliate marketing and other performance-based online mar- keting techniques difficult to reconcile with your branding aims? Steve Nicholas, Guess: We’ve just ventured into the affiliate world, launching an affiliate programme this summer. It’s a bit too early to speak about the results from that, but it’s a huge branding challenge for us. Internet marketing has been described simply as ‘achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies’ Chaffey et al., 2009. This succinct definition helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that should determine investment in Internet marketing, not the adoption of the technology These digital technologies include Internet media such as web sites and e-mail as well as other digital media such as wireless or mobile and media for delivering digital television such as cable and satellite. Marketing defined As with many terms with the ‘e’ prefix, we need to return to an original definition of the topic to more fully understand what e-marketing involves. The definition of marketing by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing is: Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satis- fying customer requirements profitably. This definition emphasizes the focus of marketing on the customer, while at the same time implying a need to link to other business operations to achieve this profitability. In this chapter, and in Chapter 9, we will focus on how the Internet can be used to achieve the processes implied by this statement: Identifying – how can the Internet be used for marketing research to find out customers’ needs and wants? Anticipating – we have seen in Chapter 5 that anticipating the demand for digital services the online revenue contribution is key to governing the resource allocation to e-business. Satisfying – a key issue for e-marketing is how to achieve customer satisfaction through the electronic channel; this raises issues such as: is the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are physical products dispatched? What is e-marketing? 416 Guess is such a well known brand and we have to be very selective when picking our affiliate partners. We don’t want the Guess name appearing just anywhere on the internet. We are keeping it to affiliates that we feel are brand-appropriate and are covering the right demographic. We could be less selective, of course – picking affiliate partners and getting short term incremental sales, but only at the expense we feel of long term company success. We’re using them for traffic more than anything – and making sure we protect the brand always. We have a Guess Factory division and e-commerce site and we are being less selective with affiliate partners for that. Q. You’ve yet to add transactional functionality to your UK and European sites. Is there any plan to? Steve Nicholas, Guess: At some point, yes. As a company, we have moved in the last few years from a wholesaler to a global retailer with a wholesale operation as well. So it’s all part and parcel of that. The relationships and infrastructure are not yet ready for us to sell online in the UK or other countries. That’s not to say it won’t happen in the next few years – it’s just getting the structure right. We are looking at the opportunities. Source: www.econsultancy.comnews-blognewsletter3415steve-nicholas-assistant-director-of- e-commerce-at-guess.html Part 2 Strategy and applications 417

Chapter 8 E-marketing