Industry overview:
From the 2019 covid pandemic that spanned all of 2020, e-commerce has seen an explosive growth. From consumers depending on online ordering to cover their essentials, to making that their continued habit of shopping, S&P Capital reports that the large capital e-commerce industry will see a growth of 50 percent. Along with other industry fields such as marketplaces, smaller e-commerce and classifieds with small growth percentages.
When we take a closer look at who is dominating large capital e-commerce, unsurprisingly Amazon has the largest market share. Taking a look at the 2018 leading marketplace traffic, we see that Amazon more then triples the closest second place eBay. It also has 12.7 times more visitors than Etsy.
We can also look at what retailers consumers favor, in a survey published by IMI International, amazon holds 58 percent favorability while Etsy comes in at 4%. While those numbers may seem less then ideal, understanding Etsy is not a traditional retailer, the numbers are quite impressive.
While you can buy anything on amazon, from paper towels to vacuums, Etsy is a more personalized marketplace with a more selective audience for what they are going to purchase. More will be touched on in the company profile.
Company Profile:
Etsy is a online marketplace where it specializes in its more handcrafted and personalized items. This is highlighted in their slogan “Shop for handmade, vintage, custom, and unique gifts for everyone”. Founded in 2005, and based in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2019 Etsy reported $818,380,000 in revenue and increased to $1,730,000,000 in 2020, a 211 percent increase.
Etsy makes their profits from taking percentages from sales and having vendor/listing fees. In total they take 8% of a transaction (5% per sale, 3% transaction fee) and $0.45 per item ($.25 per transaction and $0.20 listing fee).
They also generate revenue from vendor membership fees. While you can have a free account, additional premium accounts called their “plus plan” charges $10 a month and includes many perks that sellers can utilize.
Brand evaluation:
Looking at the company and comparing it to other larger retailers, it is important to keep in mind their type of business. As stated before, Etsy has cornered the niche market of individualized retailing. This differs from other large marketplaces which all seem to have their own niche they cover. Amazon thrives at large common retailing where you can get just about anything on the site. eBay is focused on reselling items. Alibaba is specialized for wholesale. Each company has their cornered specialty and it makes the field easy to navigate for shoppers who know what they want.
Etsy’s logo is a sheriff font that instantly shows customers that the brand is focused on elegance, which is reflected by their items they sell, personalized, vintage, unique and handmade. It is also reminiscent of other jewelry/Home goods brands which don a sheriff font for the same elegance effect. This reflects their main sales which are comprised of Home and living, art, and jewelry.
Etsy’s slogan is “Shop for handmade, vintage, custom, and unique gifts for everyone”. In my opinion this is a very weak slogan for the company. It is quite clunky, not very memorable and is a waste of good marketing for the company.
When coming up with a good slogan, it should try to encapsulate all the positive attributes of the brand, stick in consumers heads and serve as a heuristic to make consumers think of the brand. Some strong brand attributes are the uniqueness of the items, and the fact that most sellers are small shops. I think it should highlight those two things. While it really goes overboard on the “unique” aspect, it is repetitive (unique, handmade, and custom are all to similar to repeat” and vintage items make up the least number of sales, so it’s a weak selling point. Most importantly, this slogan is not used in their marketing efforts, and is too long to fit in online searches
A proposed new slogan may be something such as “Shop for a unique experience”. It is shorter, easier to remember and the word that stands out is “unique” which is their major selling point. It can be indictive of the smaller shop sellers, but getting the word out their should and will be focused more in the company’s advertising efforts.
Brand Positioning Strategy:
Etsy is still in its growth stage, on top of that, the market for e-commerce is continuing to grow rapidly and they have a lot of chance to capitalize in this current time. Their main efforts should be gaining brand recognition and getting into the minds of the consumers as a major retailer. When it comes to their advertising, they should be doing their best to engage consumers while explaining their strong benefits. They have unique items, and the sellers are smaller shops. This information can easily be wrapped into one message. An example would be showing both sides, the seller, and the buyer. The buyer would be happy because they have unique gifts and customized items, with the sellers are a small business or a person who sells as a side hustle. Consumers will understand that their purchase is helping these individuals while also knowing they can get personalized items that will stand out.
With its placement in the minds of consumers, I do not believe there is much of a gray area. Mainly people know about Etsy and their place in the market as more unique items, or people simply do not know much about them.
Consumer Profile: From Etsy’s own report, it’s seller demographic is broken down as such:
According to Fortune, Etsy buyers are comprised of predominantly women (86%) , ages 18-35 with a small but notable minority of older generations who buy crafts. 15% of buyers are under 25 with the bulk coming in at ages 25-40. As of 2018 there were 2.1 million sellers on the site and 39.4 million active buyers.
When it comes to buyer’s psychographics, their values lie in unique items and being able to get creative items, whether it be as a gift for someone, or as a way to express themselves. Sellers tend to be women who have turned their passions into a side hustle or even their main business. They take pride in their items being original and being a small business on their own. Sellers are more loyal to Etsy as it is a well established platform to host their items, relatively cheap to sell on gives them the tools to do it themselves.
Competition:
We already touched on some of the competition and how each one already has their cornered niche. But we will go further to breakdown each to garner a better understanding.
Amazon
Amazon is the largest online retailer. With 386.1 billion in revenue in 2020, it dominates the competition. Their slogan is “Work hard. Have fun. Make history”. However their slogan is rarely even used, and I would argue from their sheer market share, they don’t need to worry about it. They don’t have a campaign more so as they are working on expanding their business to different sectors. They could certainly work on their public image though…
Strengths:
They sell everything, and as such it is the first-place people come to when shopping for normal items online. With a larger barrier of entry such as listing and account selling fees, it ensures quality products are being pushed through. This quality insurance is favorable to shoppers and qualms fears of being duped or ripped off, a problem shoppers of eBay face. They also excel in their supply chain management shattering the old notion of snail mail shipping, this has laid a new expedient expectation for packages with their prime two-day shipping.
Weaknesses:
Amazons’ weaknesses lie mostly in their perceived image. They have a shaky history of shady practices. Becoming a large conglomerate driven by profit, their treatment of workers and staunch anti-union efforts have left a bad taste in people’s mouths. There are also a few scandals floating about Amazons anti-competition practices, such as Amazons “Amazons essential lines” finding profitable items to sell and then listing it above other items, listing it for less to take choke hold the competition.
eBay
A large player in the online marketplace, eBay focuses on reselling items at a lower cost then new. Users can list their old items of value and buyers can save money shopping used. Their slogan is “Buy it. Sell it. Love it.” Which does a good job establishing their main platform of buying and selling. In 2020 eBay’s revenue was 10.3 billion. Like an older amazon, in their heyday, they focused on acquisition and have several subsidiaries to stabilize profits, such as StubHub, Skype, and PayPal.
Strengths:
Easy to sell, and anyone can do it if you have stuff you no longer want.
Weaknesses:
Questionable quality of items and lack of buyer protection has drove many away. Stories of buying a new phone, only to have a broken phone in there, or items coming more damaged then what was listed has made people hesitant to continue their business there.
Communication Objectives
When looking forward to this campaign that will stem the year of 2021, there are a few base objectives we will be trying to meet. The first is the main focus of raising brand awareness. It would be nice to collect data before starting this campaign to have a baseline understanding of what consumers already believe about Etsy, how many people are aware of the brand and the depth of the brand knowledge they possess. This baseline will be important so that after wards we can measure the results to truly understand where it exceled and failed.
That being said, our biggest focus will be to run advertisements that feeds audiences information about the brand ands its strong attributes. As mentioned before the concept of this will be ads based on showing the audience what Etsy is (a unique marketplace) show the impact of shopping through Etsy (supporting small shops and women in business) and build a strong salience for the brand. We are striving for brand recall over recognition so that they will seek us out when first deciding to shop online. We will measure this from conducting market research as well as seeing if our websites visitors increase as well. If for example, our brand awareness is 40% among our target audience (females 25-40) we will aim to increase it to 75%
Our most important objectives are to increase brand awareness and brand image.
Brand awareness should bring in more customers and increase our market share while brand image is going to leave a long lasting positive attitude to our brand which will transfer to brand loyalty.
Brand attitudes
Since the focus is on growth and getting people who don’t already understand Etsy to form a positive attitude towards the brand, this will be a pivotal marketing effort if this is going to be their first exposure. For our market research we will have more clear numbers, but we would like to see Etsy’s brand attitude be around 80% positive. We can achieve this by focusing on brand image communications efforts. One idea would be building a strong brand loyalty with the vendors on our site. While they already have a strong incentive to push others to buy from Etsy, I feel we can do more to make them “Etsy brand reps”. This would be by implementing a performance incentive program. By reaching different sales marks they can receive different promotional items or benefits of the site. Different tiers for different performance will give vendors marks to work towards. If a vendor hits X amounts in sales, they may receive a custom shirt with their shops logo on it with Etsy next to the name. They will feel a sense of pride for hitting the mark, building brand loyalty, they will also most likely wear the shirt as it promotes their business along with ours which will garner a “word of mouth” exposure as the shirt becomes a talking point. With positive stories being told about sellers’ success on the site and how it promotes their business, it will inspire others to look into and plant a seed of positive attitude to the Etsy brand. There is a lot of room for this program to garner positive word of mouth exposure and aid our efforts to get more people aware of the brand.
Another Idea would be publicity events such as going on women focused talk shows such as the view and having our CEO talk about how our brand is empowering women to be their own CEO’s and shopping on our site supports them directly. The idea is that, in the month of march Women’s History Month) a part of each sale will go to a scholarship that will go towards vendors and their families to pay for college to get a business degree. This will be worked out with our PR team to coordinate the congruent message and goal of raising brand awareness.
Brand Purchase intention
We can utilize techniques to urge consumers to shop through us with promotional coupons. This will be $10 off on your first purchase when you make an Esty account. This will be a great encouragement to get first time customers familiar with our website and browsing our selection.
Brand Purchase facilitation
Not much needs to be covered for this. In our advertisements we will already explain that we are an online marketplace which would que people to search online for the store. Additionally, through Etsy plus, vendors can create their own store’s website that is powered by Etsy.
What we will be measuring
· Brand awareness and Brand perception
o By conducting a study before we will gauge consumers thoughts and total awareness of the brand, then comparing at the end.
· Monthly traffic
o Knowing how many people are coming to our site before and after will be a good mark for long lasting results. We can also use these metrics to tweak marketing messages. For example, if we see that candles are number one in sales, we can use the interest to show outside audiences that we have a valuable product that is trending in the market.
· New Vendors
o Vendor subscriptions make up a great revenue stream for the company. Increasing this will help in many ways other then subscription revenues as well. A more diverse market will special offerings will make our company that much stronger and possibly open other opportunities for the company to support them.
Budget allocation
As 2021 will be a powerful year for ecommerce, we will need to ramp up marketing a lot. In order to secure more market share in this ever-expanding market, more marketing efforts need to be pushed through to secure our brand as a major player. The method for determining how to budget for this campaign will be the objective-and-task method. With our clear and planned out first quarter campaign, we will know the rough estimate of what we will need budgeted.
The bulk of budget will go towards paying to run advertisements on streaming services and YouTube. We will also have to factor in the $10 off promotional coupon as well as any expenses for appearing on talk shows.
Creative Strategy
As laid out earlier, Etsy’s brand attributes can be summarized as such:
· Supporting small business
· Enabling others to start their business.
· Items that are unique, handmade, and/or more personalized than traditional retailers.
· Empowers women in a time where many consumers value that effort.
The Campaign “Find You Again” and “The specialized marketplace.”
Pushing into the year of 2021, we will start the First quarter campaign with the tag line “Find You Again” which will capture the new year’s resolution hype for the first quarter of the year. This slogan captures the elements of Etsy that many are favorable towards. It highlights how shopping for these unique items can “redefine” you and help you find yourself as a new person. It is also inclusive of the vendor segment where we can nudge them towards opening a shop and turning their hobbies into a side hustle.
At the start of the new year we will roll out Etsy’s “Etsy. The specialized marketplace”. This new company slogan is inclusive as well as memorable enough to trigger consumers to think of our company while trying to find gifts/ items for themselves or others.
The inclusive aspect relates to shoppers and vendors. Shoppers want something “special” and that is our offerings. Vendors who make items or run a small business would consider themselves creators of “special” or “specialized” items, meaning no market is left out or overly targeted. It also will aid when, after exposed to our ads, someone wanting to get someone or themselves something “special” for any occasion will be triggered by the que to think of our brand and push them to consider us.
The Timeline
We will go at the campaigns using many integrated marketing tools to blend a stronger and more potent message. For ease of understanding, I will break down month by month the plan as we plan and hit different goals. Note that the angle of the advertisements will have inclusive cast members, showing support of races, LGBTQ+ and while mostly aimed towards women, will typically have at least one man to not completely shut out the demographic. I feel We are able to do this without loosing our message or scope as the ads show different people, by having representation the viewer can latch to that person and should increase retention to the commercial in its entirety.
January
Start off the new year with our Q1 tag line “Find you again” along with our new slogan “Etsy. The specialized marketplace.”. After 2020 and the ensuing pandemic that has made everyone stagnant, people want to reinvent themselves. We will run an advertisement showing all the different ways people can achieve this. While hosting a diverse cast of women and at least one man, the ad will show them shopping for items like a water bottle to get in shape, materialize for their hobbies, House items that will make the place new, and one of them using the time to start selling their item on Etsy. We will also offer a promotional coupon for $10 off their first purchase (when they make a new account with Etsy) of a purchase $50 or more, or $5 off a purchase 30 or more.
This will incentivize new shoppers to look around our website and becoming familiar with it. Something that will stop a customer from shopping or re-shopping with us is un-familiarization with the process and this is geared to help them over the hump. The ad also shows all the people who look to the new year to try something new, to consider that challenge with us.
February
February is Black History Month. The social climate is very sensitive right now and we can gain support of our brand through running an advertisement showcasing our most successful Black owned companies. The commercial will revolve around two or three shops that talk about their shops, the community support, and how other women can start their own store too. This will still be under our “Find You Again” tag line. This time it will showcase how these shop owners found their real selves by vending on Etsy and how people who shopped on the site supported them.
This month we will also focus on our release of the new vendor incentive program. We will get the word out publicly to press releases about our support and incentives businesses will have. This will encourage vendors to try harder to reach a goal, when hitting goals they will gain recognition, as well as apparel that will facilitate a positive word of mouth exposure and increasing brand loyalty along with driving more sales.
March
March is Women’s History Month, another vital marketing time for our company. This will contain an ad similar to Black History Month’s but to women in general. It will have a diverse cast of women and revolve around how Etsy is helping empower women to be more and “Find you again”. Additionally, in March we will have our CEO go on talk shows to promote Etsy’s charitable promotion. For the month of March, Etsy will take a percentage of sales and with that create a scholarship fund that their vendors or their families can get to go to college to peruse a business degree. It’s important to gain loyalty to our vendors. If they feel that Etsy can’t be beat in vendor support, it will make it harder for them to seek out other revenues of sales and we will continue to get their continued business.
Targeting of Ads
We will show our ads on streaming services such as Hulu, using their system of targeting shows that are aimed at our target demographic. An example would be Grey’s Anatomy a show that is targeted to women 25-40. We would run our ads on this programming to reach that market.
We will also be showing the same ads on YouTube. It is another viable and similar platform that allows us to target our market by using their profile information or video content. An example would be targeting based on profile information or high interest videos such as female vloggers.
I have chosen to predominantly use television/video advertisements as that is the best way to target and engage our market while getting the message across. I do not feel other mediums would be as successful in engaging and properly receiving the message we want to put out.
I feel this is more then justified as the Nielsen Total Audience Report indicates that our market watches 1.5-3.5 hours of TV a day with total screen time being around 4.25 hours a day, we will be sure to expose our ads and reach the market.
Marketing Communications Objectives per promotion and how they will be measured for effeteness.
Before during and after our campaign we will be measuring consumers recall and attitude of the brand. As we strive for market penetration and taking more of the market share, these are the foundation of those aspects. Before the campaign we will measure a baseline of people brand recall and their attitudes. In the subsequent months we will continue to measure in a longitudinal study to figure out what ads work and which do not, or even their severity of effectiveness.
Incentive Coupon
With this generous promotion we would like to see an up tick in monthly traffic up 10% during this promotional month. At the current 289,000,000 that would put us roughly at 318,000,000. However, we want to see a long-term resilience of our customers, after the promotional month, we would like to retain 300,000,000 monthly visitors. We will also measure how many new accounts open in the month of January and compare it to the years prior to gauge if this marketing tool was truly effective.
Video and television ads
With a strong advertising push, the goals of these are to change attitudes, gain vendors as well as shoppers. These efforts are put into the details of the commercial. With careful thought to carry a strong message as well as give the impression it is easy to sell and buy with Etsy. We would like to see a strong attitude change of Etsy in the mind of the consumer, with the graph quoted earlier, we sit at 4% favorability in the market. With our strong and distinguished attributes, we would like to take our market share up to 10% favorability.
To gauge effectiveness of the ad, we will track a few metrics. Are shoppers checking out the items promoted in the advertisements, are new vendors singing up and sales metrics. The noticeable benchmark being an increase in revenue of 5%. This may be lower, but the campaigns efforts are intended to be long lasting, poaching the expanding market by garnering loyal customers, not necessarily short-term sales.
Talk show reception.
Since this is a more of a PR metric, this will be measured by customers feelings towards the brand. We will be looking for a spike in consumer favorability during this month and time. It’s important to gain vendor loyalty as well and that will be measured by their attitude change as well.
Vendor Incentive program
We can measure this internally by the amount of people participating, It may be harder to pin point cash flow metrics, but the efforts are more so for brand loyalty. This will be measured by vendors change in attitudes to the brand.
Sources:
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Etsy 2015 report (2015). Building an Etsy Economy: The New Face of Creative Entrepreneurship (Rep.). Brooklyn, New Yourk: Etsy.
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