Social Dimension of Shopping Products - Free Samples to Students

Question: Discuss about the Social Dimension of Shopping Products. Answer: Introduction Today, with the advancement of technologies including the development of internet, people have adapted themselves to the digital medium for their various day-to-day activities including social interactions and businesses. Thus, majority of the businesses have realized this change and adapted to it accordingly by attracting more customers with better digital marketing strategies and plan (Ryan, 2016). One of the Companies, who has its business dependant majorly on its online customer base and needs new and improved digital marketing plan and strategies is, Redbubble. Redbubble, is an Australian online art selling company that conducts its business by attracting artists to join Redbubble and sell their products online to the customers from the Redbubble website (Delaney, 2016). For this, the company does offer attractive prices to the artists as well as the customers and thus, it needs to follow an effective and improved digital marketing plan to retain its customers as well as attract new customers. This report gives the situational analysis of the company by doing a SWOT analysis and lays out the digital marketing objectives that Redbubble needs to achieve. The report also discusses on the digital marketing communication plan that Redbubble follows and highlights their market position and target audience as well as their plans to optimize their present market and expand their range of products. Thus, with the help of the analysis and recommendations made in this report, the company will be able to tackle it flaws and improve its overall functioning leading to its better performance in the market making it earn more profits. Situational Analysis SWOT Today, conducting a situational analysis is considered by many as an important step before coming up with any kind of marketing plan. The reason for going with SWOT analysis is mainly due to the reason that it not only defines the internal factors of the concerned company but also gives a clear outlook of the external factors affecting the company as well. This analysis is used as a tool to analyze and develop the strengths and opportunities and eliminate the threats and weaknesses of a company (Hollensen, 2015). Unique Concept: Redbubble operates as an online art marketplace that allows people to sell their original and creative artworks as well as designs online to the customers who seeks it. Apart from being an online marketplace platform, the company also provides the required logistics services that help by facilitating the sale and purchase of the good from the artists to the customers. The uniqueness of Redbubble also lies in its ability to enable more than 400000 artists who independently sell the designs as required by the customers (www.redbubble.com, 2017). Wide range of products: Redbubble offers a wide range of products including Photographic prints, Art prints, posters, Canvas prints, Metal prints, Framed prints, Cards, Art boards, Stickers and Supports artists globally: As Redbubble is an art selling company, it relies heavily on the independent artists globally in order o make sure that their business keep running successfully. The company supports the individual artists by paying them good selling rate for their designs and by not charging them any sales commissions or fees. Apart from this, in order to make sure that the companys mission statement of bringing more creativity to the world remains true, Redbubble has started its operation in three other languages apart from English to connect to more artists globally. Leading company in Australia: Redbubble, was founded in the year 2006 in Melbourne, Australia (www.redbubble.com, 2017). With the continuous support of passionate individual artists, the company was able to reach out to new customers and market. The rise in the demand of more distinctive and meaningful designs and artworks by the customers as well as the increasing availability of the technologies that helps in providing print on demand services helped the company to evolve as the leading global online art company in Australia. Weaknesses Less awareness: The Company conducts its business mainly through its website, redbubble.com, so in order to get the desired products the customers have to go to the official website only. This makes the company weaker in its approach of gaining more customers, as many might not have ever heard about the companys existence. Products prices higher than the market price: The base price of the products available on the companys website is too high as compared to the price of the similar products in the market. This adds on to the weakness of the company as people who are familiar with the products price from the local stores will hardly ever opt to buy from Redbubble. This in turn will cost the company to lose many of its potential customers. Opportunities Offering personalized items to people worldwide: Personalized items and gifts have been popular among the public since a long time and today with the increase in the system of online sales, people all around the globe look out for companies providing these kinds of products (Grosso, Forza Trentin, 2017). Redbubble provides its services in over 200 countries and thus people including the young professionals buys personalized products from its website. This trend is increasing day by day and along with it the target group of the company too is growing. Increase in the purchase power parity: With the increase in the purchase power parity of the consumers that allows the company to convert their visitors into customers ensures that the customers will choose to spend more on the creative products as well as decoration objects that will add up to their improved lifestyles (McKinnon Ohno, 2016). Expanding its network: Redbubble, has been expanding its market over time with its extensive advertisements with paid services including Google Adwords (Young, 2014). Being the leading company in the market of selling art and designs, Redbubble needs to open more offline stores as well to increase its customer base and to conduct its business more efficiently and earn more profits. Threats Lesser people choosing to be an artist: Even though internet has enabled the existing artists to reach out to their customers and potential customers, people are going away from choosing this field of being an artist as a profession. The reasons for this decline in choice are many including the amount of patience it takes for the art to get appreciated and acknowledged by the public (Lingo, Tepper, 2013). Thus, if the quantity of the artists decline globally it will impact the Company negatively too as Redbubble is mainly dependable on the works of the individual artists. Stiff competition in the market: Just like every other company who faces competition in the market, Redbubble too has competitors in the market. The major competition that it faces in the market is from companies including Society6 and Zazzle (da Veiga, Tavares Alvelos, 2017). Digital marketing plan Today, one of the most important marketing strategy that majority of the companies never forgets to implement is having a digital marketing plan. People around the globe have become addicted to the use of internet and spend most of their time online (Valacich Schneider, 2015). Thus, this has made businesses to be available online to sustain their existing customers and attract potential customers. The following marketing strategies could be adapted by Redbubble to ensure that its team performance gets better with time as well as its business grows: Creating a digital marketing strategy by making an ideal customer persona based on various research, survey as well as conducting various interviews of the target audience of the business. For collecting quantitative data, the company can use the help of tools like Google Analytics (Alhlou, Asif Fettman, 2016). Identifying the company set goals to be achieved and accordingly choose the correct digital marketing tools. By choosing to take help from owned, earned as well as various paid media services that will help the company to evaluate the companys existing channels and assests of digital marketing (Lovett Staelin, 2016). By regularly auditing the contents that exists on the companys website as well as in its records and identifying the gaps that exists in the contents available. After identifying the gaps, develop a new creation plan of content by making the necessary required changes. By evaluating the earned as well as paid media against the existing current goals will help the company to get a proper idea of where exactly it needs to pay more focus along with more time (Belden, 2013). By going with all the above stated steps and making use of relevant digital marketing tools, Redbubble will be able to build much strong relationships with its customers as well as increase the profits. Relevant target audience and relevant branding and positioning In the previous financial year, Redbubble has made 68.5 percent of their sales with paid media including sources from free traffic such as email marketing and organic search whereas the remaining profit of 31.5 percent from sources like Google Adwords (Geddes, 2014). Redbubble had their platform through which it interacted with Google completely re-built. This enabled the company to upload more of the content as well as the images on the Google feeds including Google Shopping helping the company to increase its volume of sales (Jones, 2017). Redbubble had its main website in English and this was a major drawback in getting the potential customers from other regions around the world with different languages. By launching the site in three different languages including German, Spanish and French, the company has been able to increase its customer base (www.redbubble.com, 2017). Thus, with the introduction of many more languages on the company website, it will further help the company to expand its market to more customers who speak those different languages. Not only this, but with the introduction of new languages Redbubble will also be able to attract many of these artists who will now be able to sell their art on Redbubble website without any language difficulty. In order to continue its growth globally, Redbubble is continuously making efforts to add more partners who will help the company fulfill its mission and achieve its future goals. The company recently got three partners in Australia and in US and is under process to get more effective partners who will make the company more stronger in the longer run. By improving the margins on the products, Redbubble now can spend largely on its marketing and still get the constant profits as well as its sales volume being able to grow more. With this, the business will grow further making the companys supply chain team in a much stronger position. One more thing that the company is focusing on is the minimization of the customer supports cost that is nothing but the variable cost growing along with the business by outsourcing the companys customer support. Digital marketing communications plan of Redbubble In order to categorize the existing digital channels that the company is already using for its digital marketing communications, owned media, earned media and paid media comes as a framework (Belden, 2013). Redbubble has been continuously optimizing and upgrading its marketing communication plan to ensure that the volumes of sales of their products continues to increase and they never lose out their customers. The company through its websites and owned channels continues to update and educate its customers as well the artists with new rules as well as how to effectively conduct business on their official website with ease. By making the proper use of the earned media attention that the company got with the positive reviews from its customers as well as from doing various promotional work, Redbubble is now using these collected information to analyze its services and improve it by providing better performances and products. Apart from the above two kinds of media framework, the third one is the paid media that simply means that the company is spending money to ensure that it gets enough visibility in the market. With the help of the paid media that includes paid posts on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, Google Adwords and sponsored posts on different websites, Redbubble has been continuously trying to uplift its game in advertising and digital marketing. Recommendations Being the leading art selling company, for Redbubble the things that are recommended to do to ensure its continuous growth in the market are as follows: Improve the experience of the users including customers and artists of its official website. By optimizing the company website, Redbubble will be able to improve its revenue to a much greater extent as it will improve the conversion rates of the visitors without paying anything extra on the ad to attract more traffic. At present, Redbubble has more than ten million images of more than sixty products on its website. By using a better and improved search engine algorithm, the company can ensure the customers that they would not have to search deeply into the website to get their desired products. Apart from improving their website, the company needs to come up with better version of companys mobile app mainly on android and iOS platforms making it much easier for the customers to search and find the designs and artwork they want to get from the company Paid advertising on social media like Facebook has proved to be effective for the company. These social networks blends with mobile apps and majority of the users of internet and active members of social media prefer to mobile. Thus, with the mobile app in existence, the promotions and advertisement of the company and the products will be much fruitful and will help the company to improve the volume of its products sales. Conclusion The report discusses the importance of developing a better digital marketing plan and strategies, that is a must for almost every company today to survive in the competitive market. This report highlights the facts about Redbubble by conducting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. An effective digital marketing plan for Redbubble is also given in this report following which the company will be able increase the performance of its team and the volume of its sales. Apart from this, the report also contains the details of the companys target audience as well as the improvements that it has considered for itself to enhance the company image and global strength. The report ends with certain recommendations for the company including its website optimization and introduction of a mobile app that will help the company to increase more customers towards it. These customers will further help the company in increasing the volume of the sales of the products and ensu re the companys growth in future. References Alhlou, F., Asif, S., Fettman, E. (2016). 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