A
Primer On Marketing
Part 3 - Place
by A. Michael Baker - Printed in Specialty Automotive Magazine
The
"Place" Component of Marketing
Where will your customers buy from you? In your store, of course. Ah,
but where is your store? Is it bricks and mortar? Is it virtual? Let's
talk about both. After all, "place" is the third most important factor
in marketing following only product and price decisions.
It's
Not Your Grandpa's Speed Shop Anymore
I'll admit it again; I miss the old speed shops -- greasy floors, wrecked
parts on the counter, and more bench racing than you can wag a tongue
at. Heck, my favorite dealership (recently closed, thank you very much
Chrysler Corporation) was Johnson's Jeep in Riverside, California. Their
small, funky, old wooden buildings exuded more charm, friendliness, and
character than you could shake a stick at. When you went into Johnson's,
you felt the heritage of the store, felt comfortable with their credibility,
and met employees who also belonged to a different, friendlier era. What
do the cold, chrome and glass dealerships say when you walk in? How about,
"I've got more money than any other retailer in town and you better not
mess with me."
Learn a lesson from Johnson's Jeep. When your customers come into your
store, they need to get that warm and fuzzy feeling. No, you don't need
to spread grease on the floor. Just look critically at your store. Is
it the kind of place that people feel comfortable walking into and hanging
out? Or, is it one of those cold, chrome and glass palaces? Earth tones
and wood: let the chrome accessories stand out instead of the fixtures.
Antique automobilia: hey we're gearheads, we're intrigued by old gearhead
stuff. Invoke heritage instead of modernism.
Want to sell parts? Make your store the place to buy them. Encourage consumers
to be in your store! Give them a place to sit and bench race, put more
than just products on display, create regular traffic with consumable
products like nitrous refills, and make sure your employees turn off the
high pressure while encouraging people to relax, take their time, and
enjoy themselves. Make your store into a the kind of place where a consumer
feels welcome to spend the afternoon even though the only thing they bought
was a soda out of your machine or a virtual "ride" in your arcade machine.
There are countless ways you might increase traffic in your store; and
you need to try them all. Traffic is the lifeblood of retail commerce.
There are also countless ways to keep people in your store. Shopping time
is the heartbeat that pumps profits into retail sales.
Virtual
Stores Extend Your Reach Beyond Your City's Borders
Bet you thought I was going to talk about the internet here. I will; but
first we need to deal with the old, and still champion, type of virtual
store: Mail Order. Yes, you detest those price cutting mail order guys.
So join them. Pick products that are unique, exclusive, and/or price competitive.
Start with those little 1/6 and 1/12 page ads in the "marketplace" sections
at the back of the magazines. I'll let you in on a little secret that
the magazine publishers don't want you to know. Dollar for dollar, those
little "marketplace" ads are the most effective ads in the whole book.
Don't waste money on expensive graphics. A good logo, a dynamic headline,
a reasoned presentation of the benefits, and decent prices are the formula
items. Now you've got your first virtual store.
E-Commerce
- Hope and Hype
Recently, Levis announce that the closure of their greatly hyped e-commerce
site. What happened to the promise of big sales growth worldwide from
instant online ordering and individual customization? Levis says that
the high cost of implementing and maintaining an e-commerce site made
it unprofitable to do business in cyberspace! Retailing on the internet
can be a money winner or a money pit. We will give you some tips and starting
points that will help you get a store online with profit potential maximized
while minimizing expense.
First, let's look at virtual hosting. You're all familiar with AOL, Earthlink,
Compuserve, and other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who provide you
with access to the Internet. You go on AOL and then visit a web site.
What you are doing is contacting the computer that holds the files for
the web site, the "host" computer. The digital files which will make up
your web site will be placed on such a computer and, because visitors
see only your site instead of the host computer, this is called virtual
hosting. You could put your own full time host computer on the net; but
the expense would do the same thing to you that it did to Levis. So you
need to put your new site on someone else's computer.
Now we have another choice. You can rent this computer space from companies
like AIT, Mindspring, or any of the thousands of virtual hosting companies
around the world for as little as $19.95 per month. Beware of the "virtual"
virtual host. Some companies out there selling web hosting don't actually
have any computers on the net! They buy your site from AIT for $19.95
per month and resell it you for $49.95 a month. Keep your costs low by
eliminating the middlemen. When you buy your web site this way, either
you build your own web pages in your spare time or you hire someone to
do it for you. Most hosting companies like Mindspring provide e-commerce
tools in their package deals, technical help, and easy ways to manage
your site. Easy to use programs like Adobe Pagemill or Macromedia Dreamweaver
give you simple ways to build web pages for your site. Basically, for
$100 in software, $70 to register your "dot com" store name, and $19.95
per month you've got a virtual store on the web that can bring you sales
and profits.
Pretty cool; but wait there's more. You can put your virtual store onto
a service, like Yahoo! Store, which will give you the hosting, site building
and management, cataloging, credit card processing, export information
for your accounting system, mailing list management, and analysis of your
site's effectiveness. What does it cost? Yahoo! gets $100 per month plus
merchant banking (credit card processing) fees for a site with less than
50 items on it. That's not 50 different product categories; that's 50
individual part numbers. The base price goes to $300 per month for up
to 1000 items with an additional $100 per month for each additional thousand
items. Yahoo!, AT&T, IBM, and many others offer these kind of preformatted,
e-commerce enabled sites for painless entry into "e-tailing".
Would you pay $300 of your hard-earned bucks a month for these services.
No, I won't let you! There's still more! In the honorable tradition of
FREE Internet, companies are now offering these same services free of
basic cost with low merchant banking fees and reasonably priced additional
premium services. Bigstep.com, eCongo.com, and freemerchant.com all offer
free e-commerce stores. Some of these free store hosting operations, like
freemerchant.com, can even provide you with revenue for running ads on
your pages! I believe that this is the place for most of you to start
your e-commerce store; it's easy, it's quick, and it's cheap.
Now you've got three stores. One on main street, one in the magazines,
and one in cyberspace. How can you not make more money?
It's not possible to go into great detail on these three subjects in the
space of this column; so we've just hit the high points. If you would
like to see one or more of these subjects in a longer feature article,
just write, call, or e-mail.
