Location

As I stated earlier, the third "p"--place--concerns not only how a product reaches the end consumer, but where a consumer goes to purchase the product in the first place.  On the Internet, there are no physical stores, only "virtual" locations that provide selling points for the consumer.  These locations are actually electronic web pages which are housed on large servers all over the world. 

Recently, however, there has been this growing misconception among marketing researches that the actual "place" or location consumers visit to purchase an item on-line is actually the domain of the company.  By this, they mean that "dell.com" is the actual location consumers visit to purchase a Dell computer.  This way of thinking is not only unnecessarily too abstract, but also quite incorrect.  Using that theory is the same as saying that your street address is where someone goes to meet you.  This is not correct--someone goes to meet you at your physical home which is found at your street address.  Your street address simply acts as a pointer to help people find you.  Company domains such as "dell.com" and "microsoft.com" are, in both a symbolic and technical sense,  pointers to the company's web site. 

In actuality, it is the web pages found by using these domain pointers that act as the true selling point. Company domains actually fall into the concept of the fifth P, positioning, which we will be getting to very shortly. What is important for you to understand at this point, however, is that the web pages held on computer servers are what truly define the location of on-line product purchase, regardless of the consumer's understanding about how it all works.