Marketing Made Not So Simple
Providing services is one thing, but making sure that those services are correctly targeted and capable of making a return is quite another.
On a recent trip to Poland I discovered a wealth of home-grown on-line applications and services on offer. Everything from Polish equivalents of Ebay to MSN and MySpace designed for Poles by Poles have been created, launched and are proving to be incredibly popular when compared to their U.S. designed counterparts. Although broadband internet and numerous Polish specific on-line web services have been available in Poland for sometime, the market is just beginning to try and find its feet so far as on-line sales and revenue goes, and is still looking for the right formula so far as marketing on-line services to public or business users is concerned. Herein lies an important challenge to this new market, and one that doesn't just apply to them, but to us all. How do you best attach value to, and extract revenue from your product? Many of the Polish services on offer are incredibly popular in their native country, in some cases having a total monopoly on the market for a particular type of application or service. However, despite their dominant position, many application and service providers have yet to attach any revenue mechanism to their products. This is partly to do with the tremendous under funding and resourcing of the entire e-commerce and internet services sector in Poland, with many companies being under-staffed, as in the example of one of Poland's most popular native on-line messaging services which is owned and operated entirely by the man that originally designed it, and staff being generally under valued and under paid. However, it is also to do with the unusual nature of the Polish market. In Poland consumerism is a relatively new concept. The highly developed consumer wants and needs of most evolved western markets, and the consumer models and marketing strategies that accompany them do not necessarily apply here. For example, having an on-line map service which shows you homes for sale in an area each time you try and look up a street is hardly going to be useful in a country where most people live in small shared rented apartments and have little in the way of bankable securities. As such a more in depth consideration of revenue strategy opportunities must be undertaken for this specific market, based on its individual qualities, needs and desires.
The point here is that companies cannot simply provide services and then hope for the best, as even when total market domination is theirs they still may not be making any income unless the correct mechanism to do so is in place. By correct I not only mean a system that offers the capability to make customer based revenue from a product, but one that is actually appropriate to the market it is targeting. This could range from the deliberately un-corporate donation based revenue system which appeals to the sensibilities of, and is favoured by, the open source community, to marketing value added systems solely based on regional identity and interest, as is the case in Poland. Either way companies must take care to look closely at the needs and wants of each individual market or group that forms their customer base, and must remember that designing in value added concepts at an early stage of development is key.
Web based marketing and services have the potential capability to be targeted at very specific and small consumer groups without the need for high additional resource or monetary expenditure in a way that no other medium has ever had. For companies to ignore the opportunities that this could offer, to apply broad strategies to multiple individual and distinct markets and to generally assume that simply providing a service will lead automatically to revenue is madness.