Digital Marketing Week 3: Micro-Environment

Digital Marketing: Online Marketplace Analysis - Micro-Environment

• Week 3 of a digital marketing course
• Professor: Gülsüm Vezir Oğuz
• Course covers online marketplace analysis, focusing on the micro-environment
• Chapter 2: Online marketplace analysis: micro-environment
  • Main topics: situation analysis for digital marketing, digital marketing environment, understanding customers in digital markets, consumer choice and digital influence, customer characteristics, competitors, suppliers, new channel structures, and digital business models for e-commerce
    • Identify elements of an organization's online marketplace impacting digital marketing strategy
    • Evaluate techniques to understand the importance of customers, intermediaries, suppliers, and competitors in digital marketing strategy development
    • Review changes to business and revenue models enabled by digital markets
• Questions for marketers:
  • Capabilities for understanding the online marketplace
  • Relevance of actors in the micro-environment to future business
  • Marketplace analysis and its role in digital marketing planning
  • Customer needs changes with digital platforms and implications
  • Comparison of online marketing with competitors
  • Finding suitable intermediaries in digital marketing strategy
• Situation analysis for digital marketing:
  • Collection and review of information about an organization's external environment and internal processes to inform strategies
  • Macro-environment: broader forces affecting all organizations (social, technological, economic, political, legal) -Includes international, economic, legal, and cultural factors
  • Micro-environment: specific forces on an organization from stakeholders -Includes technology trends, innovation, suppliers, competitors, intermediaries, and customers
• Understanding customer in digital markets:
  • Customer segments
  • Search intermediaries
  • Intermediaries, influencers, and media/publisher sites
  • Destination sites and platforms
• Consumer choice and digital influence:
  • Customer characteristics (demographic, psychographic, behavioral)
  • Social media and emotions
  • Consumer personas
  • The buying process
• Figure 2.9 (Framework for understanding online customer experiences):
  • Antecedents (information processing, perceived ease-of-use, usefulness, benefits, control, skill, trust propensity, perceived risk, enjoyment)
  • Experience (cognitive state, affective state)
  • Consequence (customer satisfaction and re-purchase intention)
• Figure 2.10 (Summary of how digital media impact buying process):
  • Shows conversion between digital and traditional channels during the buying process, including awareness, product information, supplier search, evaluations, purchase, post-purchase processes
• Competitors: The shape and nature of online competitive markets, including competitor analysis, and benchmarking
• Porter's five forces: (Bargaining power of customers, power of suppliers, rivalry between competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes)
• Competitor analysis & benchmarking: Review of internet marketing services from existing and new competitors; structured comparison of e-commerce practices
• Suppliers: Digital marketing intermediaries, online intermediary sites
• Digital marketing intermediaries: Firms promoting, selling, distributing products or services by marketing, destination sites, sites owned by merchants/retailers providing details, Online intermediary sites facilitating exchanges.
• New channel structures: Types of direct (Producer-Retailer-Consumer) and indirect (Producer-Wholesaler-Retailer-Consumer) transactions
• Digital business model for e-commerce: KPIs, Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Proposition, Customer Relationships, Channels, Cost Structure, and Revenue Stream.
• Alternative perspectives on business models (Figure 2.15 examples):
  • Marketplace position
  • Revenue model
  • Commercial model (e.g., price, fixed-price, subscription)
• Case study: Boo.com - Learning from failure:
  • Strategic assumptions & decisions leading to failure
  • Boo.com marketing strategy vs. competitor successes
  • Evaluating Boo.com's marketing mix
  • E-retail techniques adopted by Boo.com now commonplace