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Chapter 5 E-business strategy 317

United Kingdom to grow from £600 million in 1999 to a page to download. Eight seconds is not great but
£12.5 billion in 2005. the question is will it be worth waiting for?
However, New Media Age (2005) does note some
Of course, today, the majority of European users have
reservations about this market, saying:
broadband, but in the late 1990s the majority were on dial-
Clothes and trainers have a high rate of return in the up and had to download the software to view products.
mail order/home shopping world. Twenty year olds
may be online and may have disposable income but Communicating the Boo.com proposition
they are not the main market associated with mail
Early plans referred to extensive ‘high-impact’ marketing
order. To date there is no one else doing anything
campaigns on TV and newspapers. Public relations were
similar to boo.com.
important in leveraging the novelty of the concept and
human side of the business – Leander was previously a
The Boo.com proposition
professional model and had formerly been Malmsten’s
In their proposal to investors, the company stated that partner. This PR was initially focused within the fashion
‘their business idea is to become the world-leading and sportswear trade and then rolled out to publications
Internet-based retailer of prestigious brand leisure and likely to be read by the target audience. The success of
sportswear names’. They listed brands such as Polo, this PR initiative can be judged by the 350,000 e-mail
Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Fila, Lacoste and pre-registrations who wanted to be notified of launch.
Adidas. The proposition involved sports and fashion For the launch Malmsten et al. (2001) explains that ‘with
goods alongside each other. The thinking was that sports a marketing and PR spend of only $22.4 million we had
clothing has more standardized sizes with less need for a managed to create a worldwide brand’.
precise fit than designer clothing. To help create the values of the Boo.com brand,
The owners of Boo.com wanted to develop an easy- Boom, a lavish online fashion magazine, was created,
to-use experience which re-created the offline shopping which required substantial staff for different language
experience as far as possible. As part of the branding versions. The magazine wasn’t a catalogue which
strategy, an idea was developed of a virtual sales- directly supported sales, rather it was a publishing
person, initially named Jenny and later Miss Boo. She venture competing with established fashion titles. For
would guide users through the site and give helpful tips. existing customers the Look Book, a 44-page print
When selecting products, users could drag them on to catalogue was produced which showcased different
models, zoom in and rotate them in 3D to visualize them products each month.
from different angles. The technology to achieve this
was built from scratch along with the stock control and The challenges of building a global brand
distribution software. A large investment was required in in months
technology with several suppliers being replaced before
The challenges of creating a global brand in months are
launch which was 6 months later than promised to
illustrated well by Malmsten et al. (2001). After an initial
investors, largely due to problems with implementing round of funding, including investment from JP Morgan,
the technology. LMVH Investment and the Benetton family, which gener-
Clothing the mannequin and populating the cata-
ated around $9 million, the founders planned towards
logue was also an expensive challenge. For 2000, about
launch by identifying thousands of individual tasks,
$6 million was spent on content about spring/summer
many of which needed to be completed by staff yet to
fashion wear. It cost $200 to photograph each product,
be recruited. These tasks were divided into twenty-
representing a monthly cost of more than $500,000.
seven areas of responsibility familiar to many organiz-
Although the user experience of Boo.com is often
ations including office infrastructure, logistics, product
criticized for its speed, it does seem to have had that
information, pricing, front-end applications, call centres,
wow factor that influenced investors. Analyst Nik
packaging, suppliers, designing logos, advertising//PR,
Margolis, writing in New Media Age (1999), illustrates
legal issues, and recruitment. At its zenith, Boo.com had
this by saying:
350 staff, with over one hundred in London and new
What I saw at boo.com is simply the most clever web offices in, Munich, New York, Paris and Stockholm.
experience I have seen in quite a while. The presen- Initially boo.com was available in UK English, US
tation of products and content are both imaginative English, German, Swedish, Danish and Finnish with
and offer an experience. Sure everything loads up localized versions for France, Spain and Italy added
fast in an office but I was assured by those at after launch. The web site was tailored for individual
boo.com that they will keep to a limit of 8 seconds for countries using the local language and currency and