Search CompleteMarkets

... , to pre-pay the bill. Is this convenience? Does this save time? Isn't it more complicated and time-consuming than stopping by the dry cleaner on the way home from work? This is a case in which saying it doesn't make it so. Also, the demise of more than one highly touted e-commerce home delivery company seems to verify the need to deliver on promises as well as deliver the groceries and dry cleaning. Although competitive pricing is crucial, to many customers time might be equally important, and in some instances, even more so. This is another effect of the Internet. Do people really shop for price when they're surfing? Those who use priceline.com seem to be. Yet it's been pointed out that customers purchasing annuities via the Internet fail to search for lower-priced products, even ... niche. Customers using the Internet gravitate to Web sites providing the products and services that most closely meet their needs. From a marketing perspective, the task is to take this insight and apply it to a company's overall marketing strategy. For example, most businesses sell to a variety of market niches, but they fail to market to them as niches. A good example is a material handling equipment distributor. The management team reviewed the company's customer base and identified five industries in which they were doing substantial business. Over the years the company had developed expertise in each of these fields, and both their sales and support staff were highly competent to deal with the industry-specific issues in each one. The distributor changed its marketing to focus on the needs of each niche. Instead of seeing itself as ...