Winning e-Brand Strategies: Developing Your Online Business Profitability

It’s the approach taken to development and marketing in e-commerce that differed from the rest of the market when we started designing our website back in September 1999.

We were a small traditional British business with ambitions to sell our range of Savile Row silk ties around the world. In this book we want to dispel many of the new economy myths, in particular that only those with high marketing and advertising expenditure are absolute winners on-line.

Dean Markham and I developed a website marketing framework to support our Hunters’ tie brand that would achieve the type of site visitors we wanted – focusing traffic – using a technique that Dean has been at the leading edge of for some time in California.

We (LuxuryTies) have won a lot of great search engine rankings using Dean’s website optimisation techniques which, when aligned with our own Hunters’ niche brand development marketing programme, enabled us to mix the latest technology processes with some of the most established business practices.

The idea is to focus on a segment of your total market and create value through a programme of brand evolution and tactical e-commerce development, utilising your own virtual organisational structure to its fullest. You don’t have to be an IT specialist or a business school graduate to do any of this. You just need to know that a system exists, and where and how that system should be used within your organisation’s value chain.

We are always surprised that whenever we ask business schools or business how many have ever heard of the term ‘optimisation’ we get about three hands raised out of thirty people, and yet it’s the key to success. This book describes the biggest lesson we learned in e-commerce – a lesson that led to a fundamental rethinking of our own marketing and brand development programmes. It’s not that difficult to understand providing you take the time to read and think about where and how you can apply this process.

The steps and ideas that we describe in the Hunters LuxuryTies case study are:
· Gaining an intimate knowledge of your market.
· Understanding how to generate added value
· Evaluating and selecting markets
· Brand definition for your segment
· Creating innovation in technology – understanding what applies
· Developing the distribution channel
· Using distinctive capabilities in brand development
· Updating and site content refreshing
· Becoming your market’s authority
· Continual optimisation to meet new market segments and niches

To achieve this we will work with a mix of case study and experience-based analysis, supported by an actual optimisation process that you will be able to follow.

Martin Brighty is Co-Founder and CEO of Hunters the UK branded clothing producer who in 1996 along with David Walker created a business with a global presence on less than £1,000.

Dean Markham is Founder and CEO of Californian based Search Engine Promotion Services who provide strategic consultancy within the marketing and e-commerce field - globally.