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Congratulations! Finally, you can take a breather and then grab your twelfth cup of coffee. You have made it to the last of the marketing P's -- positioning. Although often discussed, positioning has never officially made it into the mainstream as the "5th P," perhaps because they would have to rewrite all of those dusty text books. In any case, positioning can be one of the most important parts of Internet marketing.
To begin, let's take a little quiz. After you have finished reading this paper, you are distraught to discover that this paper is the only thing you've been reading for the past five days and need a good book to calm your nerves (follow me with this one). You hop in your car and are trying to decide where you should go to get a good fiction novel. What is the first bookstore to pop in your head?
Chances are, it is a national bookseller such as Barnes and Noble, Little Professor, Waldenbooks, or Borders. Regardless of whatever bookseller is at the top of your list, the company holds a great deal of influence and that placement is prime real-estate. Companies spend an enormous amount of money through their advertising in an attempt to influence you to think of them first when you think of a product category. That process is what marketing professional call "brand positioning". How many times have you said, "I'll have a Coke" to a waiter when you really are talking about a Pepsi? That type of brand positioning is priceless.
The world wide web version of positioning is even more crucial since it is no longer arbitrary. The product category is quickly becoming the brand's position. Continuing with the book example, what do you think is the first thing the average Internet user types in to find a book-selling site? You guessed it, "www.books.com". And if you are one of the major national book sellers, you better believe that you want to own that address. The closer your web address (or "domain") is associated with what you sell, the higher you will be on a typical consumer's positioning list. Unfortunately, only one person can own a given address and this makes domains such as "books.com" prime real-estate. Strangely enough, "books.com" is actually owned by a small book company called Book Stack who has been available electronically since 1992 and only just recently announced that it was going to begin selling books on-line. The old adage, "you snooze, you lose" couldn't be more appropriate for some of the larger booksellers that waited too long to register the domain.
This limited real-estate of the web has heightened the scramble for companies to acquire the "perfect domain". This is so much so, that many recent squabbles have arose that required legal action for resolution. Individuals, acting much quicker than some of the larger companies, have purchased domains such as "mcdonalds.com" before McDonald's even considered going on-line.
After being sent to court, the individuals were forced to give the domains to the respective companies since domain names were now considered a type of intellectual property regardless of ownership. In addition, other individuals and companies have snatched up domains such as "aple.com" that hope to capture visitors who make spelling errors typing in web addresses such as for Apple Computer. It is not uncommon for the courts to force these people to return the domains as well due to the confusion it could possibly cause.
As humorous as these examples might be, brand positioning on the web is no laughing matter. It could eventually mean the success or failure of a business. |
