Comparison Of Marketing Approaches Of Amazon, EBay, Alibaba In An Essay.

Select one major issue relating to brands and brand communities and use this as a framework to compare and contrast the marketing approaches of online retailers Amazon, eBay and Alibaba.

Analysing case studies provides you with insights into real-world companies’ and the problems and challenges they face with marketing and general management decisions. These challenges provide you with an opportunity to diagnose problems, analyse and evaluate the situation and develop strategic decision choices based on the conceptual frameworks learned in this subject. It allows you to connect your academic theoretical skills with your practical business skills; this is a very important attribute for developing your professional career.

Subject concepts should form the basis of analysing case information, developing alternative solutions and making recommendations. You should read the papers a number of times before attempting to write anything. This will highlight areas that you need further information on and you can then conduct the necessary secondary research, including academic papers, reports and media coverage. You should then apply marketing concepts, theories and empirics covered in the subject to the problem.

You may find sometimes that cases have incomplete information from which to make decisions, or that managers have made decisions based on incomplete information. In this instance, you may need to (a) make some assumptions about why they made these decisions and describe these, or (b) research the company, industry or issue and determine the appropriateness of your assumptions or you may wish to conduct some additional research into the industry or similar type of companies or issues for ideas and trends. Some cases do not focus on one firm or decision maker but may take an industry perspective. In this specific case, take the view of a consultant analysing the issue and consider what organisations may be involved and how you would analyse the situation from their perspectives.

From past experience, the most difficult aspect of case analysis for students is the idea of “analysis”. Most students simply repeat what’s in the case in their own words or simply rearrange the same information. While the latter is definitely desirable and helps to break up the case into smaller components that can be analysed, analysis takes one further step and that is to explain, using the language of marketing, the implications of this information for the firm and the key decision makers.

• understand relevant marketing concepts and explain the concepts through application to the specific marketing problem;
• analyzeand evaluate information in a marketing context;
• using appropriate information sources, analyze information gathered to provide depth and breadth to observations and conclusions; and
• demonstrate effective written communication skills.

Marketing Theories

The modern world of business is observed to get significantly competitive and with the entries of considerable number of new names in the market, the situation is getting tougher day by day for the organizations (Chui & Manyika, 2015). The organizations are observed to try their level best to cope up with the intense competition of the market with the introduction of the attractive offers for the customers. But the option of discounts and offers are also observed to be difficult for many organization. Several multinational organizations are observed to think in a different manner where their focus was on the creation of a community for their respective organization through the increment in the brand awareness. Such organizations are observed to invest in bulk in the marketing of their products. The promotional events from the part of those organizations are observed to be triggered in such manner that it covers the maximum number of existing and probable customers. The main objective of such campaigns is to make sure that the customers of their operational areas of the organizations get to know about the positives of the businesses of the concerned organizations. The paper is focused in specifying the comparison among the strategies and implementation of them for three renowned organizations which are Alibaba, Ebay and Amazon.

The variability in the businesses of the modern day organizations are observed to be so limited that the organizations are facing the absolute need to point out each and every small positive variations for their organizations. This is undertaken by the organizations with the sole interest of gaining maximum competitive advantage. The pricing, quality and the product manufacturing tactics for the modern organizations are getting so similar day by day that there is no significant difference that can portray a particular organization better from the other ones. But the theory of business conduction and the generation of the profits will significantly depend on the customer’s choices (Malik et al., 2013). Under such condition, the product of the organizations are manufactured in such a manner that they follow the preferences of the customers (Solomon et al., 2014). Even in that case the organizations are observed to consider the promotion and marketing of the goods to be the top most priority as the concept of brand awareness in the business conduction makes it pretty evident that the purchases are directly proportional to be people’s knowledge regarding the product. However even in that context, organizations are observed to differentiate among themselves in the various aspects like better pricing, better communication in terms product promotions or better societal activities to earn the customer loyalty and the faith of the community.

For the chosen organizations, it is observed that Amazon is more concerned with the better pricing strategies as the management knows it pretty well that the products will be subjected to better sales when the prices for them are low. The strategy had a clear vision from the part of the management as they considered that it is better to use the huge money that they spends in the marketing and promotional activity of the products, in the reduction of the selling price rather than the marketing of the products. The organization was observed to reduce the package marketing and was focused in improving the price of the products so that the target customers be able to buy the products (Huston, 2018). This was a significant strategy from the part of the management as the concerned organization was able to create such a situation where the competitor organizations was observed to lose their hope and somewhere this was creating a monopoly for the organization as that is evident with the comment of Cakmak in his note (Kristensen et al., 2017). On the other hand, the renowned Chinese businessman, Jack Ma was able to make his organization one of the most profitable one in the history of Chinese and World business. According to the comments of Mr John Holton, Asia Partner with the Branding Strategy Agency, Prophet, Jack started from the scratch and is able to create an emperor today just with his skills of communication. Several Chinese organizations are observed to be market leaders in the modern business industry of the world but it is observed that there vision in term of making the customers feel the organization of their own is blocking the growth of the organizations. It is pretty evident that the organizations like Huawei, Xiaomi or Lenovo even after such improved generation of sales and generation revenue is unknown to the major section of the western society and for that the vision is the only responsible aspect for the organizations. Apart from this the organization is observed to follow the path of the societal wellbeing or development for the promotion of their organization. It is evident in the case that Ebay feared the fact that with the introduction of the Amazon into the Australian market, there will be a seizure of the market share. Under such situation, the organization initiated a campaign in the name of the “Fill Your Cart with Colour” in order to attract the customers. The campaign was focused in supporting 40000 small businesses, 80 online retailers along with 11 million frequent visitors with their exclusive and attractive offers (thedrum.com, 2018).

Comparison of Marketing Strategies of Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba

With the reference to the brand recognition and brand awareness theory of the modern business conduction, the cases were significantly different from each other. The amazon’s strategy was to make sure that the competitors in the industry gets reduced after acing an intense rivalry in the pricing of the products and on the other hand, Ebay was significantly focused in making the scope of entry shorter for the new entrant, Amazon into the Australian market. Ebay’s policy was to generate lines of competitors for the new entrants and that was visible with the support that it provided to the 40000 small businesses. Apart from this, Jack Ma was observed to take the most significant policy when it comes to creation of brand awareness (Jung, Ugboma & Liow, 2015). Jack Ma was able to do what several world market leaders representing the Chinese territory was not able to do. Alibaba was observed to have a good presentation of in front of the customers of both Asian and the western (Huang & Sarigöllü, 2014). Jack named his organization in such a manner that enabled the people of western and rest of the world call it without any sort of difficulty (Doland, 2018). Jack’s communication is one of the key factor in the success of the organization as it is visible that the integrated marketing communication triggered by Alibaba was able to reach the western society and the community as well (Barreda et al., 2015). Though Alibaba is still a company that is unable to become a household name in the western countries, but it is having the best strategies in order to accomplish that. The need of having a significant marketing communication in the generation of the brand awareness and Alibaba’s accomplishment in that is pretty evident with the fact that Jack Ma is able to convert the organization to such heights that it is having a worth more than the total sum of Amazon and Ebay in the current market.

Conclusion:

On a concluding note, it can be stated that among the three organization, Jack Ma had the most influential strategy for the generation of brand not only in the Asian market rather in the world market. Amazon’s policy was significantly attractive but it was associated with notable amount of risk as well as the low pricing strategy could backfire as well. Similarly the support that Ebay was observed to produce to the small businesses had the potential to affect its own share of market as well and that was risky business strategy from the part of the organization as well. Following the theory of brand awareness, Jack Ma had the most suitable approach in terms of market coverage and the generation of a distinctive brand with all possibility to rule the future business market.           

References:

Barreda, A. A., Bilgihan, A., Nusair, K., & Okumus, F. (2015). Generating brand awareness in online social networks. Computers in human behavior, 50, 600-609.

Chui, M., & Manyika, J. (2015). Competition at the digital edge:‘Hyperscale’businesses. McKinsey Quarterly.

Doland, A. (2018). Branding Lessons From China's Alibaba. Retrieved from https://adage.com/article/global-news/alibaba-teach-chinese-brands/295115/

Huang, R., & Sarigöllü, E. (2014). How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. In Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors (pp. 113-132). Springer, New York, NY.

Huston, C. (2018). Amazon is taking away the power of brand names, throwing another industry into turmoil. Retrieved from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-taking-away-the-power-of-brand-names-throwing-another-industry-into-turmoil-2017-07-10

Jung, J. C., Ugboma, M. A., & Liow, A. K. (2015). Does Alibaba's Magic Work Outside China?. Thunderbird International Business Review, 57(6), 505-518.

Kristensen, M., Penner, J., Nguyen, A., Moy, J., & Lam, S. (2017). Company Synopsis for: Amazon. com, Inc.

Malik, M. E., Ghafoor, M. M., Hafiz, K. I., Riaz, U., Hassan, N. U., Mustafa, M., & Shahbaz, S. (2013). Importance of brand awareness and brand loyalty in assessing purchase intentions of consumer. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 4(5).

Solomon, M. R., Dahl, D. W., White, K., Zaichkowsky, J. L., & Polegato, R. (2014). Consumer behavior: Buying, having, and being (Vol. 10). London: Pearson.

Thedrum.com (2018). Ebay Australia launches major brand campaign as it readies for Amazon arrival. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/09/04/ebay-australia-launches-majorbrand-campaign-it-readies-amazon-arrival