Marketing Strategies for the Shoe Industry

Marketing Strategies for the Shoe Industry They separate different type of these shoes can help the customers find the shoes they like quickly and clearly. And the sale can attract the customers buy their shoes. Let the customers buy the shoes have a quick way and lower price. Advertisings Sign up email face book twitter Sales discount Though this advertising, the customers can know the shop when they online. They can satisfy customers new demand. Sales discount always can attract customers. Though the online information they can know the news very quickly and they can tell the information to others. 2. ALDO: http://www.aldoshoes.com/uk Shoes categories Trends: military; Victorian; galactic; American; heritage Women: sandals; buzz worthy boots; mid heels; lace-up boots Men: shoes (plimsolls &trainers; moccasins; casual; smart lace-ups; smart loafers) Boots (casual boots; dress boots) Sandals Special size for big size New arrivals Colours They have special size for big size, so there are more people have special size can buy the shoes they like. Give the price level can help customers buy the shoes which the price they prefer. Advertisings Free delivery when you spend over  £75 Sign up email: get 10% off Face book Digital connect on homepage When customer need to have the delivery they can buy the shoes price over  £75 and they can have free delivery. This can attract customers buy the shoes price over  £75.Though sign up the email, for the shoe shop, customers get more information about the shop and can tell their family and friends. For the customers they can get 10% off, they would like to go this shop. 3. Schuh: http://www.schuh.co.uk/ Shoes categories Women: high heels, low heels, flats, boots, sandals, trainers. Mans: trainers, shoes, boots, sandals. Brands: womens brands(schuh/ugg/red or dead/irregular choice/nike/iron fist) Mens brand (converse/adidas/fred perry/base London/ikon/vans/) Junior: girls(low heels/flats/boots/trainers/sandals/new in/bestseller) Boys (shoes/boots/trainers/new in/bestseller) Advertisings Face book twitter Blog Schuh TV Sales gift card Free delivery They have free delivery, the customers buy their shoes no need to pay the delivery. More convenience to people and attract more customers. 4. Converse : http://www.converse.co.uk/ Shoes categories Shoes : Chuck Taylor/Star Chevron/one star/Jack Purcell Collections : Chuck Taylor All Star Slim/ Blondie/One Star 74/Star Player/Weapon Advertisings Blog (top 10) Videos for advertising Hot chip film on homepage Different types of converse and the homepage is very fashion, this can attract more young people to visit. The film and videos can show the new products directly to the customers. 5. Clarks : http://www.clarks.co.uk/ Shoes categories: Women: boots/ankle boots/pimps/sandals/shoes/winder styles/party styles Men: Boots/Gore-tex styles/waterproof/active air/workwear/modern style Kids: boots/waterproof/willies/casual/sports/cica/school/bootleg Sports : boots/shoes/ waterproof/walking/hiking/trekking/open air/free style Originals : shoes/boots/desert boot/classic/fashion style There are many types of the shoes can be chose by customer. Advertising: TV e-mail TV is the best way to introduce the products. Most people watch TV and can see the advertising, and know more information about this shoe shop. TASK 2 WEEK 1(01/11) Note taking from internet and text book WEEK2 (08/11) Essay plan for marketing plan short report WEEK3 (15/11) Marketing plan first draft WEEK4 (22/11) Short report first draft WEEK5 (29/11) Task 67 first draft WEEK6 (06/12) Presentation-PPT WEEK7 (13/12) Marketing plan Short Report Task 6 Task 7 Final draft TASK 4 BUSINESS VISION I prepare to expand my business and set up a website about sell hand-painted Special Shoe. The website can give many choices to the customer. Customers can choose the picture they like and we can help them paint the picture on the shoes. So the Special shoe will have USP (unique selling point), this means that your product and service can attract more attention from customers in the eyes and mind. Special shoes will sell these to people who want have their own style. The coverage of my shoe shop will be the UK. More and more young people want to aspire after new fashion and be different from others, so they favour original things to show their personality. I found some well-known companies also do the hand-painted shoe, like Nike and Adidas. Every year they launch a limited range of hand painted footwear. Our shop does the B2C (business to customer) part, B2C part can help us know what the customers want and can save money and time. Customers can buy their favourite shoes cheaply and quickly. We can use website, newspaper and magazine to attract customers and make people to know our Special Shoes. Analysis External analysis Everybody needs shoes and there are many kinds of shoes in our life. For the country footwear is an important part. There are  £6bn of shoes sold to UK and half of them sold around the world (Britfoot, 2010 ). Today, some companies do hand-painted shoe business, for example, Converse was very famous for its canvas shoes. In recent years, Converse put out hand painting shoes, but these shoes are limited. So this cannot satisfy most customers demand .Our hand-painteg shoes are having a rational price and when the customer want these shoes we can painted for them. Most people can buy a pairs of shoes they favour and show their individual. 2. Internal analysis Our on-line shop sell hand-painted canvas shoes, but for different customers we also sell the colour pen and no pattern shoes, so customers can paint the shoes in any way they like. For all the customers we will teach them how to wash the shoes and they can return of goods if shoes have any problem within three days. Because I have 4 physical shops in high street, so I have existing customers and I have enough money to set up my special online shoe shop. Start my business I need some people to help me. I structure them in three groups, first is the group who buy raw material, second is the group who painting the shoes, last one is the group who sell the shoes. 3. SWOT analysis a ¼Ã… ½Strengths My shop start a new style of shoes buying, there are three main strengths of my hand painting shoes. First, because I already have four physical Special Shoe shop in High Street, so we have the basic of the customers for my Special online shoe shop. I set up online Special Shoe shop can increase many new customers for my business and make more profit. Second we paint the shoes of the customers choice so the customers cannot find another pair of shoes like it. Third, because our online Special Shoe shop do B2C part, so we can communicate with customers quickly and clearly. We can know what the customer really want and satisfy their demand. Special Shoes have a reputation for giving advice about foot problems and they can use this knowledge to do the same on the Internet. We can find the health magazine talk about the podiatry service and put our online shoe shop website in. This can tell the people that our shoes are comfortable, and then attract more people to visit our website and buy our shoes. b. weaknesses First, we can not produce with a large number of hand painting shoes. Because we make these shoes by hand, this restricts our output, and we need more time and more labour to produce shoes. Second, because we sell the hand painting canvas shoes, so this not for all people. The hand-painted canvas shoes just one kind of Special Shoe. For example, customers will not buy these shoes when the weather becomes cold. c. opportunities Economy is recovering now, however The world economy is facing difficult and dangerous times (BBC News, 2010) that means economy will not grow much, companies sell goods not very high. And though economy grow slow, but economy not too bad. Companies sell goods not too low. I start business online must careful, we need prepare everything to face any problem. Today, more and more sellers choose start a business online in UK, and the customer in UK spend  £42. 7bn online in 2010 accounting for the CCR (Centre for Retail Research).(BBC New , 2010) I start an on-line shop, so I can increase many new customers who need special shoes and keep the existing customers. d. Threats Our threats come from other online hand-painted shoe shop. People prefer buy famous brand. So the famous in the world, like Adidas and Nike will attract more customers. We must buy the raw shoes from the factory. If the factory makes the mistake of the shoes or do not give us the raw shoes on time, we will face trouble, for example, we can not give the hand painting shoes to customer on time or the shoes have quality problem, these will make us lose trust from customer. Marketing and sales 4 ps Product We supply our products to the people who want to show personal style. We put the picture online and the customers can choice. The customers also can e-mail the picture they like and we painted for customers. . We also can sell the pigment and paint brush to customers, if they want to paint the shoes by themselves. We try our best have a good reputation and supply good products and service to customers b. Place We sell the hand painting shoes on-line. Customers can enter my online Special Shoe shop and buy shoes anytime and anywhere. And we no need to pay the rent of physical shops. It has a lower cost to set-up an online Special Shoe Shop. The customers around the world can know my online Special Shoe Shop and buy my products. The online shop is no geographic retractions. Pricing We have different level price of the shoes. The price of the hand-painted shoes will between  £80 and  £150. These prices are based on the brand of the canvas and the pattern. For example, the shoes have simple pattern will be cheaper than the shoes have complex pattern. Promotion The promotion brings the benefit to the products, and promotion will give the products a brand and an image that the customers will pay attention to your products. I choose online activities and offline activities to promotion my online Special Shoe Shop. I use online activities, first of all I need search engine registration, and search engines can help the customers find the information about our business and products. We pay fees let our online shops web site at the first page of the search engine. When the visitors enter our online Special Shoe homepage, they can sign in our webpage use e-mail address. So I can collect these visitors e-mail address and send the e-mail about our Special Shoes. We can make a video of shoes being painted and put this video to YouTube or other video website to introduce my online hand-painted shoes. Second, I will use newspaper and Magazine to advertising my online Special Shoe Shop; for example, is the most fashion magazine in UK, most people read this magazine, we put our hand-painted shoe in this magazine, so more people can know my Special Shoe. Newspaper and Magazine advertising are cheaper than the TV ad vertising. At same time we do direct mail. I will send the information about my online Special Shoe Shop to the customers who buy the shoes from my physical shops; let them to understand our online hand-painted shoes. Customers Existing customers My Existing customers are the people shopping in my four physical shops in High Street. We want to keep these customers so we need give these customers convenient and we need work hard and give better service to customers. And we must pay the attention to all the Special Shoes, so we can know what the customers really like and meet their demand. New customers I set up an online Special Shoe Shop and sell hand-painted shoes. So I have new customers who need have their own style and buy our hand-painted shoes. And I do the online and offline promotion to attract more new customers to know and buy my Special Shoes. Conclusion In conclusion, online shop has many benefit of my Special Shoe business. It helps me expand my business; increase the kind of Special Shoes. Thereby, increase the customers and profit. Nowadays, more and more people shopping online. There also have problems of my online business, we cannot do the batch production and our online shop is a new, so just few people know us. However, if we have good advertising and the best products, I believe that my online Special Shoe shop will have more customers and become famous in the future. Bibliography Schneider, G.P. (2007),eBusiness 7th edition, Thomson Learning, Inc: London Edwards,S. Economy, P. (2009), Home-based Business for Dummies, Dummies 3rd Chaffey, D (2004), E-Business and E-Commerce Management, 2ed edition, Inc: London www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11721010 www.britfoot.com http://ezinearticles.com http://www.clpstudio.com/ http://www.paradoxartistry.com/temp.htm Task 5 With the development of society, Internet becomes very important in our life. Internet has much information from the world and it becomes a global resource (ezinearticles, 2010). The definition of online shopping is that the act of purchasing products or services over the Internet.(www.businessdictionary.com). The Internet also becomes a popular way to buy products. Because people can find the products they want to buy very quickly and clearly. They can buy the products at home or office. Online shopping is very convenient, so more and more people choose online shopping. Search engine is important for a website. Sellers must make sure the customers can find your shop very quickly and easily. In this short report I will explain what search engine is positioning, how importance of search engine positioning to the online shop and enabling the customer to find the website easily. The definition of search engine positioning is that The process of obtaining high page ranking on Search Engine Results Pages, these results pages are a list of links pertaining to a specific user submitted search term. Positioning is only relevant for search engines with crawler technology (www.anduro.com/glossary.html ). Search engines have three main parts. First are simply bots, this can finding the website the customers interested in. When customers entering the information the result will give you page title, keywords in page text and the information from other website. Second is storage, when the customers stored the website, the computer has an index for stored the website. Third part is the search utility, search utility can help visitor take the term they find match the search term in index. Then the visitors can choose the links they will visit.(Gary P. Schneider, 2007) Search engine is the important part of online shop sell Special Shoes. We must make sure that the customers can find our website quickly and easily. Search engine is important for e-commerce. So, give the search engine a good positioning is also important. We make the search engine have a good ranking, so our website will go to the first page of the result. Just like Google, when you search information, you will find there are thousand results. If put the website in first page or the top, the visitors will find the website easily and quickly. And this can help us have more visitors and increase the click volume. Based on the importance of search engine positioning, find the good way to increase the ranking of the website is the basic thing we need to do. We can give the search engine money to buy a good positioning. We can put the title of the text as the search engine or put the keyword of my product. For example, I sell the hand painting shoes, these shoes include in special shoes. So I can put the special hand panting shoes as the description of the website. Now I designed three domain names for my Special shoes online shop site. 1. www.cnadyhandpaintedshoe.co.uk 2. www.canvaspaintedshoe.co.uk 3. www.specialdiyshoe.co.uk I prefer choose the first one to be my website domain name. I choose this name in many reasons. First, I open an online shoe shop but not normally, the shoes are special. Second, the shop domain name include my name and I have 4 physical shops in high street. For the old customers the can easily remember my name. The pattern on the shoes all painted by ourselves. The customers can find our website when the customers entering hand painting shoe. Attract visitor I need to attract the visitors to visit my website and buy my special shoes. At first, I need to build a brand of my shoe shop and give it an image; this will make the people remember it easily. And make the customers trust you. For all the seller and customer reputation is the most important thing. We must make sure the quality of shoes and solve the problem very quickly. And we need effective communication with customers, let them to know my shop and my products. We can e-mail them the information of our Special Shoe. The other important thing is that makes sure your homepage special, clearly, and has enough point to attack the customers. For example, if we have the discount, we can put the discount information in a full position. We can use the big title to introduce our main products and put some customers feedback on homepage, these can make visitor know more about our shop and trust us. Because I have 4 shoe shops in high street, so I can have an advertising to introduce my online shoe shop in these 4 shops. I can put the shop website on the wall and window. And give the customers some discount in these high street 4 shops if they go to my online shop. For example, when the visitors go to my online shop to download a picture and print it out, they can take these pictures to the high street shoe shop and then get the discount. In conclusion that many people choose online shopping, so it has a good benefit. However there are many online shops, so there also have strong competition. For online shop, search engine positioning is important; we must give our website a good ranking at search engine, so the visitor can find our online shop easily and quickly. We also have a easy remember domain name. We do many methods to attract the customers to buy our shoes. Bibliography Schneider, G.P. (2007),eBusiness 7th ed, Thomson Learning, Inc: London Edwards,S. Economy, P. (2009), Home-based Business for Dummies, Dummies 3rd Kent, P.(2008), Search Engine Optimization, 3rd Edition. http://ezinearticles.com, Why is the Internet important www.businessdictionary.com Supply chain management Make supply chain short Supply chain is composed by many parts. They are complex; include the manufacturer and suppliers, warehouses, retailers, transporters and customers. So when the customers want to get the products, it will have a long process. But we do e-commerce; we can use the internet to contact the renders, so we can make a short supply chain and we can save a lot of time and reduce the cost of some part, so we can get cheap products and can supply in time. At same time we can ensure the customers can buy cheap and good quality products. Transaction Transaction plays a point role; every part of supply chain will have the transaction. We do B2B system to the suppliers and B2C to the customer. These all need transaction. Transaction will finish on Internet, so this reduces the mistake and save time. We must make sure the transaction safe and quickly. We can find the transform company have the good quality, and cooperate with the company. It has highly accurate so it is safe and have many item can be scanned so it more flexible and save time. Also when the customers buy the shoes from our online shop, we must send the shoes to the customers as soon as possible. So express company also important, we cooperate with the express company we believe. Stock control Every shop has its own store; the seller must make sure they have enough stock to meet demand. We use Internet to understand the demand fluctuation, so we stock the right products to satisfy customers demand. For our special hand painting shoes, we make sure we have enough no pattern shoes. So when the customers order the shoes, we can paint the pattern they like on shoes and send them to customers at s short time. If we have enough stock, we can save much time and can attract more customers. Because we use online, we can use the internet to follow the stock, so can be check the stock from anywhere there is an internet connection. Use internet, we can control the stock directly. Information flow Information will affect the sellers decision. All the information we get on Internet. E-commerce technology gives a fast way to communicate and share information. Every time have its own need, the seller must understand what the customers need and catch the opportunity. We can build an information system and get the information from the internet. For example, we can ask the customers do the questionnaire online, so we can know the customers demand. Depends on the information we will do the right products and service. Special shoes can use an Information System that will help them know where deliveries are; what customers are buying; where customers are; what the best prices are for their suppliers. They can have a Just-In-Time system to use this. That way they can use the information flow to bring better service to the customer and make lower costs to make prices lower. E-Procurement We do not have our own firm to produce the raw shoes, so we must purchase these raw shoes from the firm and for our hand painting shoe, we need purchase the pigment and the painting brush. This is B2B system and we finish the procurement on Internet. E- Procurement helps us purchase the raw products quickly and reduce the error. Because use e-procurement we can communicate with the supplier online also can sign the contract online. Use internet are very convenient to contact if they supplier far away from us. Purchase online we have not the geographical limitations; this means we can find the supplier all over the world. We have a good supplier, so we can give our customers good quality and cheap products. Find a supplier firm we trust, so the customers also can trust us. Bibliography 1.Schneider, G.P. (2007),eBusiness 7th ed, Thomson Learning, Inc: London 2.Wiley, J. (2007), Supply chain management-best practices, Chapter 1 3. http://logistics.about.com/ 5. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=scm http://www.bestpricecomputers.co.uk/glossary/supply-chain-management-software.htm Task 7Returns policy As a good company, not only take care of its profit, but also has a good after sale services. When online shopping more and more popular, return policy become more important. A good return policy can help the shop attract more customers and make the customer trust you. So you can get a good reputation. I consider five parts to build my special shoes return policy. The circumstances of purchased shoes allowed to be return As a general rule, we allow the customers return in 14 days. If the problem is the size, the pattern they do not like or there is the quality problem we will allow to be return. Because, the customers buy the shoes online so they can not try the shoes, and some times the size of shoes will have a little difference. Due to the pictures of shoes on the website and the real shoes have the difference of colours, the customers also can return the shoes. The exchange policy If the customer is not satisfied with the shoe, they can order another one in exchange. However if they order another pair of shoes have different level of the price, we will return the remaining money if another pair of shoes cheaper, and the customer give us money if that one expensive. When the customers want to exchange, they must provide proof a payment, such as receipt. The refund policy By law, customers located in the European Union à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ have the right to withdraw from the purchase of an item within seven working days of the day after the date the item is delivered. (www.amazon.co.uk) We will use this as a basic refund policy and offer to pay for postage. The condition of the shoes must be return The shoes must be return when we find there are some quality problems we will call the shoes back and solve the problem. At the same time we will give the customers another pair of shoes and give them some discount. Responsible for postal charges If the customer wants to refund, we will pay for the postal charges. We can give pre-paid label for return. And customers no need to worry about the postal when they refund or return the shoes. This makes customers happy and trusts my shop. This point can attract more customers.