Pricing
Advertising
Pricing
Part of matrimony.com's value proposition is to deliver our
product for a price that is less than that of our competitors. We intend
to follow the Wal-Mart pricing approach of "one low price". For
automation purposes, we intend to create a pricing mechanism based on our
cost, but we will monitor our prices to ensure that they are approximately
10% below department prices. Different product classes will have different
competitive markups.
Another aspect of our pricing model is shipment and handling. In all instances
we will add a shipment and handling charge to the price charged to the
wedding guest. When computing our value price, we will need to anticipate
freight costs. To offset these costs, we plan to locate distribution centers
as close to our target customers as possible.
Sales taxes are another item that can effect our pricing model. Depending
on how our operations are set up, we may be able to avoid charging customers
sales tax in some states. This could give us an additional price advantage
over retail establishments in those states. Similar to shipping and handling,
this should also be factored into our pricing model. Our systems should
also be designed to highlight the fact to our customers that they are saving
a sales tax charge.
Advertising
Given matrimony.com's limited resources, advertising will have
to be carefully targeted. Our advertising strategy will initially have
three elements:
- Print Magazines / Newspapers
- Bridal Fairs / Expos
- Internet Based "Advertising"
As we have a narrow target audience, we feel we will
be able to effectively focus our advertising in a few key publications.
Some key publications that come to mind are bridal magazines like "Bride"
or high technology magazines like Wired.
In addition, limited advertising in Redmond/Bellevue and San Jose newspapers
may be effective. It could also be possible to put fliers up on kitchen
bulletin boards in firms such as Microsoft
,Intel ,Starwave
, Visio , etc.
Matrimony.com will purchase a booth and send a marketing team to bridal
fairs - specifically focusing on fairs in the Seattle and Silicon Valley
areas. At the fairs we will advertise our URL and show on-line demos of
the matrimony.com web pages.
Last, and probably most important is internet based "advertising".
Advertising is in quotes because it refers not to "paid advertising"
but "word-of-mouth" advertising. Email, bulletin boards, personal
web pages, etc. all provide a mechanism for opinions (good or bad) to flow
very easily among the "internet community". We need to be extremely
aware of this and indoctrinate our employees so that the understand the
power of word-of-mouth advertising on the internet. Any single customer
has a great opportunity to become a very visible advocate or critic. In
addition, we will need to dedicate resources to contacting other already
existing wedding related sites or search engines and ask them to link to
our page.