Organizations Creating Digital and Physical Presence

One of the seven Ps of marketing is the P of Place. It refers to the location of a business and how the choice of it will either improve or become a bottleneck to a business enterprise.  Traditionally, this P has always referred to the physical location of a business. With the advent of the internet, we now also have space. Space refers to the online presence of a business on the World Wide Web.  A company website is increasingly becoming one of the most important assets of the company. Even companies that have no websites use online ways of marketing like placing adverts and videos for marketing purpose on the internet.

Digital space on the internet has helped boost the co-operate image for many companies today. This is due to the fact that all businesses appear the same on line. There is no standard of measure unlike in the physical sense when big companies have bigger premises. The internet levels the ground for companies that have websites and both the big and the small business have an equal chance to sell their goods and services. Furthermore, the internet helps to give companies global presence. This applies to even the small companies which are housed in one office in one locality. The company will have a vast market to reach and it will be done within a very small time frame.

But as more and more companies today rush to embrace the internet, some experts now believe that it will soon loose its advantage and businesses will revert to the traditional strengths and forms of business (Smallwood). It has been observed that most industries that are seemingly at the peak are actually at the decline stage in the product Life cycle (Levvit 30). This categorically implies that the Place where a business is located is very important in maintaining longevity.

 The dynamics involved speak of three kinds of business. There are those that have no Space presence; they are just physically located in a building and all business practice happens there. They even have no company website. There are those that are purely online and have no physical location. They sell their goods and/or services on the internet using e-commerce. But then most organizations today are a hybrid of the two.  They have both space and place. It is often considered a metamorphosis of sorts. Most organizations that are online began with a physical location then in the product life cycle, they had to adapt in order to be portable.  Portability refers to increasing presence in the market (Enis).The internet has facilitated this to a great extent.

The challenge to the marketing managers today is how to facilitate a seamless relationship between the space and the place. Customers need to move from one to the other without feeling like they are in a different place. Most companies use colors to achieve this. The corporate colors are reflected on the website, the business cards and in the physical offices. The other way is consistency of information. The information on the website should always be similar with the information that will be given in the physical location.

An important factor worth noting is the different purchase characteristics of the different types of customers. Some customers prefer to get all the necessary information about your company on the website. This information could be anything ranging from the company profile to the prices (Mullins, 339). E-commerce enabled websites help to reach out to this segment of the market as they will also prefer shopping online. But there is the other category of customers who prefer going to the place as opposed to the space of the business. This could be for a variety of reasons but the biggest is skepticism about the safety of the internet.  

It is of importance for a company to ensure that both the place and space of a company are well located. A good domain name should be chosen for the website which is short enough to be easily remembered by the clientele and yet long enough to give meaning to it. On the other hand, the physical place should be carefully selected. A clean environment which is accessible is top on the list. A business positioning is not just about the place or the space but also about the positioning it has in the minds of people.

References

Mullins, J. W., Walker, Jr., O. C., & Boyd, H. W. (2005). Marketing Management: A

Strategic Decision Making Approach (7th Ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hil.

Levvit,T. Harvard Business Review: Marketing Myopia. 53(5), 26-40.

Smallwood, J. E. (1973, winter). The Free Library: What is Strategy? Retrieved on 17, September 2010 from, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/MichaelPorter:What is Strategy?-a085608624

Enis, B. M., & Cox, K. K. (Eds). (1973). The Product Life Cycle: A Key to Strategic Planning in Marketing Classics: A Selection of Influential Articles, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.