Web-only retailers use mass media to push brands amid growing competition
As the number of online retail sites rises, web-only retailers such as Overstock.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. are turning to the mass media to ensure their brands don’t get lost in the crowd. Overstock.com was looking to create brand awareness when it launched a national ad campaign in October 2003. Overstock sells brand name products at clearance prices.
“We looked at the Internet and knew that the bricks-and-mortar (merchants) of the world—the Wal-Marts, the Targets—had the opportunity to be online merchants,” says Stormy Simon, senior vice president of branding and customer care. “We thought it was important to start branding before some of the other bricks-and-mortar brands made their presence online well-known.”
After a four-week test of a radio ad campaign showed promising results, Overstock.com, No. 18 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, put together a national TV ad campaign featuring model Sabine Ehrenfield urging consumers to “make the ‘O’ part of your life.” In the commercials, Ehrenfield always is dressed in white against a white background, giving the commercial a distinctive look.
Within three years of the campaign launch, awareness of the Overstock.com brand increased to 65% from 12%, Simon says. But it’s harder to quantify the impact of the campaign on sales, she says. “Someone sees a commercial today and has a birthday in three weeks. Does that commercial prompt them to visit Overstock to buy that birthday present?”
For Netflix.com, No.66 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, the online DVD rental service, mass-media advertising seemed to be the best approach to marketing a product to a mass audience, a spokesman says. “We’re a fast-growing consumer brand, becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer mindset,” he says. “When you get to be that type of a company, you go to all the marketing channels you can.”
The Netflix spokesman won’t discuss the results of the ad campaigns, but notes that the company will be shipping its one billionth DVD in 2007.
Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, is a Keynote Speaker at Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose, in a session entitled The Transformation of the Movie Rental Industry.
Geof Atkinson, Overstock.com’s marketing chief, is speaking at Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose in a session entitled E-mail Marketing: Being Persuasive, Not Offensive.
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