I remember 16 years ago, we were watching a cricket match on Television. You must have noticed that how different companies sponsoring the match display their advertisements and banners across the boundary, and now even painted on the grass as well. It is a good way to promote your business and hammer your slogans on a large number of live audiences as well. Now, everyone knows how lucrative it is for the companies to market themselves and their brands in sports matches, and it pays off too. Since, that was 1999, and a new kind of internet was coming on board, I saw one company with the tag line, “For more experience please visit www.ThisIsUs.com Yes, they were using a first mover approach in getting an extra chunk of the audience to visit them in cyberspace as well.

The new market:

It opens up a whole new horizon for businesses to project themselves globally while remaining where they are. It also opens up challenges and competition, which would later grow businesses to gargantuan   scale and we also witnessed businesses going down and never coming up again. I remember asking my students a question, which was pretty mind boggling at that time, that; “What would happen when every business you see, also has an extension on the internet, and what would happen to the choice of the customer?”

One of the students responded that it is the same effect as you go to a “Farmer’s Market” and the loudest of the shop owner gets your attention! For that time and context, he was right. Why? Because it was a new kind of commercial domain which was being set up at that time, so whoever was moving first was actually moving ahead.

What is actually happening?

In the years to come, everyone started to come aboard the cyberspace, websites started to turn into shopping places, Amazon was a big name, and things started to get a complex.

A customer on the internet does not have to listen to the voices of the shopkeepers anymore, they are now sensible, more intuitive and a click away from you. Depending on they see you and decide to click, are another thing. Quality started to shift its definition from just being a “fitness to use” of something, to “Value” to some persons who matter at a time”.
The way it works:

Idea:

You visualize an idea of boasting yourself, your business, products, or services on the internet. You think about it, how it will work. You decide if you are going to sell them right there, or have another door opened for your customers and then let them arrive at your doorstep. A lot of contexts applies to this idea. A lot of opportunities, risks and domains are explored. You must have seen a few past 10 years.

Conceiving:

Here you develop that idea into a feasible form, a website, an application or a forum on the internet. There are now several ways to generate traffic on your venture, social media has grown very powerful and there are special human resources who get the job done. Search engine optimization, chat rooms, viral campaigns, paid advertisements and social media pages.

The Niche:

Once the idea is there in its full fledge form, the next is to create a niche in the market. What businesses do to each other in common market place is to create Barriers to entries for other similar businesses, when a new business is launched; it requires challenging these barriers to entries. The force, with which these barriers are pushed in all direction to create a market space, is a work of strategy, planning and market research. Here the business usually create niche for itself. This uniqueness in marketing, product or customer segment creates room.

Retain:

We need to get them back, and we need to let them do it again and again. For this, we need to be aware of who visited our domain, what was their interest, did they post any remarks, and what products they seemed interested in. A lot of analytic tools are now on board, and we love to use them for our and your convenience, and the result? An awesome business domain!

Easier than said than done!

Saying it, that we are living in a global village, which now resides on a cloud is easier to say than done. There is now a whole new ball game of Strategic Management, Marketing, and Customer retention activities. The pressure is now doubled, and the competitors do not work against you, they work with you.

We need to realize this, and we need to act fast. The quality of what we manufacture and put up to our customer now includes that Web portal that we are selling it on. It is the same sense of a physically located shop in a market, where the customer decides to stops and enters, when they have a good feel about its face value, the lightening, and above all your own smiling faces.