Page 207 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 4

are often directed at specific market segments. If you walk through a shopping mall, you
can observe that colors, displays, lighting, background music, and even the clothes worn
by sales clerks vary with the targeted segment. For example, a clothing store for teenagers
presents a completely different experience to its customers than a clothing store that sells
expensive, conservative attire targeted toward more mature women with larger incomes.
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Market Segmentation on the Web
The Web gives companies an opportunity to present different store environments online.
For example, if you visit the home pages of Juicy Couture and Talbots, you will find that
both pages are well designed and functional. However, they are each directed to different
market segments. The Juicy Couture site is targeted at young, fashion-conscious buyers.
The site uses a wide variety of typefaces, bold graphics, and photos of brightly colored
products to convey its tone. The emphasis is to make a bold fashion statement and,
presumably, become the envy of your friends. In contrast, the Talbots site is rendered in a
more subtle, conservative style. The site is designed for older, more established buyers.
The messages emphasized are stability and timeless elegance. These images appeal to a
market segment of people looking for classics instead of the latest trends.
In the physical world, retail stores have limited floor and display space. These
limitations often force physical stores to decide on one particular message to convey.
Exceptions do exist, such as a music store that has a separate room for classical
recordings (with background music that differs from the rest of the store) or a large
department store that can use lighting and display space differently in each department;
however, smaller retail stores usually choose the one image that appeals to most of their
customers. On the Web, retailers can provide separate virtual spaces for different market
segments. For example, Dell’s home page includes links to separate sections of its site for
home users, small and medium businesses, public sector organizations, and large
enterprises. Some Web retailers provide the ultimate in targeted marketing—they allow
their customers to create their own stores, as you will learn in the next section.

Offering Customers a Choice on the Web
Dell has done many things well in its online business. Its Web site offers customers a number
of different ways to do business with the company. Its U.S. home page includes links for each
major group of customers it has identified, including home, small business, medium and large
business, government, education, and health care. Once the site visitor has selected a
customer category, specific products and product categories are available as links.
Dell Premier accounts give users a high level of customer-based market segmentation.
In these accounts, Dell offers each customer its own Dell Web site. Dell can customize a
company’s Premier account pages to show product selections for which price and terms
have already been negotiated. Dell even allows individual employees of its customers to
create their own personalized pages within their companies’ Premier pages. This highly
customized approach to offering products and services that match the needs of a
particular customer is called one-to-one marketing. The Internet gives marketers the best
opportunity for highly customized interactions with customers that they have had since
the heyday of the door-to-door salesperson in the 1940s and 1950s.

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