Page 41 - E-Bussiness and E-Commerce Management Strategy, Implementation, and Practice

M01_CHAF9601_04_SE_C01.QXD:D01_CHAF7409_04_SE_C01.QXD 16/4/09 11:02 Page 8

8 Part 1 Introduction

For that, we’re analysing where the traffic is going from natural search results so
that we can give the customer choice on those pages, and also looking at how to make
sure people go to the pages they want to go to.
Q. Do you have any challenges in terms of funnelling search traffic – whether
natural or paid – through your site, rather than straight to etailers? Do you allow
brand bidding, for example?

Ted Speroni, HP.com: We are currently assessing what we will do in this area from
both a technical perspective and from a commercial perspective as part of our co-op
marketing programme with the channel. I would anticipate that we will do some limited
pilots as part of this assessment.
Q. How difficult is it to maintain communication with partners across multiple
channels?
Ted Speroni, HP.com: We’re pretty happy with the multi-channel approach we have
taken. Encompassing all the different ways customers want to buy products is the
most important thing.
We’ve struggled with that for a long time and we’re just trying to make each channel
as efficient as possible. We still have a way to go – I’m still working on a number of
projects to optimise the different channels.
One thing is the question of high street retailers and the question of integration of
inventory. When a customer wants to buy a specific camera they want to know whether
it is in stock today, and I don’t want the site to send them to the wrong place.
Q. How are you managing the syndication of your product content to your part-
ners in the programme? How challenging is that?
Ted Speroni, HP.com: My team syndicates out [electronically distributes] all the
content to our resellers. What this is all about is we want to control the HP brand in
relation to our products. We produce electronic content feeds in 28 languages of all the
product information – pictures, marketing messaging, specifications, everything.
Whenever a customer anywhere in Europe is seeing information about an HP
product, there’s a very high probability that that will be content we have created. The
picture is the picture we want people to see. We feel it’s been very successful for us –
not only in terms of controlling our brand, but also in terms of cutting costs for our part-
ners. They don’t need to do content acquisition.

We’ll either syndicate the content via XML feeds, or sometimes the resellers are
buying the content through content aggregators. And this extends beyond simple
product information – we also syndicate out our recommended cross-sell products. If
you buy an HP printer, we have a list of recommended accessories.
This is a key thing – similar to what Dell have talked about in terms of increasing
average shopping basket. Our top priority partners are partners that sell complete HP
solutions, so this tool helps them sell complete HP solutions. Resellers can’t say they
don’t know which products sell well with others, because we are telling them.
I should also mention another component – we’re not just syndicating content, we
also syndicate a configurator for configuring PCs.
We feed all the data into the configurator about the different configurations you can
build. You as a customer configure the PC and the information goes into the shopping
basket of the retailer, as well as coming through to the HP factory so we can build the
configuration. We then match up the order when the retailer passes the order through
to us, and we ship it.
It goes beyond syndicating content – you’re syndicating widgets, real web apps
that can be integrated into websites.