|~||~||~|Imagine one morning you wake up and ask yourself why all the roads and highways in your country exist, while at the same time totally oblivious to the invention of a car. Holding just a wheel in your hands, you consider some of the vague possibilities of using the million miles of roads in front of you.
Well, that’s exactly where we are on the information super highway. So far there has been a flurry of flashy websites with a few twisted email addresses. This is just like having a wheel in your hand and being totally unaware of the finer workings of an automobile, never mind a tractor, 40-foot trailer or a even a Japanese bullet train.
Businesses are in need of quick and serious shock therapy in order to graduate from the earlier excitements of owning a few flashy websites. This early exuberance fuelled the false notion of being ‘a master player’ of global e-commerce among senior boardroom members.
But let’s face it, most organisations have nothing but a few web pages linked to the net. The magnitude of ecommerce is so vast that it demands a deeper understanding on how to capitalise on this freely available trillion-dollar public infrastructure.
In a recent study by ABC Namebank on the issues of cyber-branding, around 10,000 websites taken from the top businesses around world were analysed and each was measured on its distinct personality, visibility and value to the end-user. The study was divided into two parts, the timeline of initial adoptability and the bottomline of return and profitability. The results were alarming.
A number of organisations scored highly when it came to the quick creation of a ‘moderate’ website. However, the efforts to strive for readership are significant and most continue to struggle to drive traffic via online banner advertising. The poor corporate image of ecommerce has become a major challenge for corporate communications.
When it came to bottomline issues, the knowledge base in understanding the precise nature and rules of online profitability through the application of e-commerce models was extremely poor. Thousands were chasing the same few overly repeated models and falling flat. In the race for the top only the first few choices have a chance, while millions of others sink to the bottom.
The two major reasons for most e-commerce failures are the lack of an adequate selling proposition and the threat of financial collapse. ‘Cheap’ is losing its power while ‘free’ is rapidly taking its place. Global competition is so fierce and the labour cost disparity so wide that most bargains are no longer working, and there is always another supplier to offer it for far less, or even for nothing.
Most corporations still see their selling proposition somewhere in the middle of an old fashioned glossy brochure. The traditional promotional model with its visuals overdose is often replaced in ecommerce with animation overload.
This approach shifts all the intelligence from the proposition to often useless information leaving the customer with no motivation to act or pay the site a return visit. This is if they can actually find your site. A huge number of sites are unsearchable. This means that unless a potential customer remembers all the twisted variations of a URL, access can become almost impossible and the game plan is often lost.
With millions of sites being added to the web all the time, there is much to be said about simple, one of a kind globally protected name identities. This demands the application of a five-star standard.
To achieve this CEOs in the Middle East must formulate a management task force to review this as a critical boardroom level issue. They must bring the open-minded IT teams closer to marketing, seriously explore the selling proposition and image positioning strategy and see how the current URL name identity works and identify the difficulties it faces. Nothing less then an open debate in search of a perfect solution will work.||**||
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