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A NEW PROMOTIONAL MODEL
The spectrum of online and offline opportunities to promote a site can be bewilderingly complex. How can one rationalise these options and build a promotional plan that optimises the total advertising spend to deliver the maximum number of visitors?

In an attempt to answer this question a conceptual model has been developed, which is based in part on de Kare-Silver's ES Test (15). The ES Test was proposed as a measure of how readily goods and services can be transferred to the online environment. It was developed in the context of electronic retail shopping, but applies equally well to all goods and services in all industry sectors. De Kare-Silver based the test on an evaluation of three factors (described in detail in his book e-Shock 2000, but only briefly explained below):

Product characteristics
Familiarity and confidence
Consumer attributes

This model has been adapted and extended to assist with decision making about promotional matters. Another factor has been added:

Company Commitment and Resources

The intention here is to resolve the promotional opportunities along two axes, one being the relative cost of promotion, the other into a binary division between online and offline media.

An example is shown below in Fig. 4.4 - in fact derived from some of the data collected in the Business questionnaire, as presented in Fig. 3.13.

Fig. 4.4

A third dimension can be represented by the relative size of bubble to indicate an estimated 'relative effectiveness' for each method. The names, positions and sizes of the components of the chart are clearly open to debate, and should be adjusted in the light of experience.

Optimal choice of promotional channels will be determined partly by the nature of the product or service in question, and perhaps more importantly by the type of consumer. Thus, some products are more naturally suited to being sold and advertised over the Internet, such as commodities like airline tickets.

Though de Kare-Silver conceived the product characteristics as a measure of suitability for online selling, it is also a feature that must be considered when deciding on the type of promotion. The more 'offline' a product tends to be by nature, the less suitable it is for selling online, and the more it may need to be supported by offline promotion.

Consumers too have preferences and behaviour patterns that predispose them to being influenced by online or offline media. No matter how much time users spend online, they mostly inhabit the real world, and are therefore still subject to exposure to traditional advertising channels.

The product and consumer factors are briefly described below:

PRODUCT TYPE
This measures on a scale from 0 to 10, the ease with which the essential characteristics of a product or service can be conveyed or represented on the WWW. Products which appeal primarily to the senses of sight and sound, such as books and music - and so are more easily communicated online - score highly. Products which do not really have a physical dimension, but appeal to the intellect, such as banking and insurance, also score highly in the virtual dimension.
However products which appeal mainly to touch, taste and smell are not so suitable for virtual promotion - e.g. perfume. The essential features of these products are difficult to convey across the Internet, and are therefore not so suitable for promotion online.

CONSUMER ATTRIBUTES
Some consumers are more amenable to offline rather than online promotions, and vice versa. Key to any successful promotion exercise is the ability to target the right audience and to be able to define it accurately - this is particularly true of any online activity. Businesses must understand their customers as accurately as possible, through deep rooted market immersion.
As with products, customers can be scored on a scale 0 to 10 for their level of comfort with a virtual environment - though the ES Test uses a scale from 0 to 30.
De Kare-Silver categorises consumers into six profile types (after A.C. Nielsen, Mintel, Henley Centre, Kalchas), as these are conveniently spread across the spectrum from highly 'physical' to strongly 'virtual'. In decreasing order of comfort with a virtual medium, these types are:

Convenience - or 'frenzied copers', these people suffer most from lack of time, and just want to find what they need and go quickly.

Experimental - these are early adopters, who are willing to try things out.

Value - these users are 'mercenaries' driven by a search for value, and will respond to anything that represents the best value.

Ethical - a minority who place ethics and morality above all else in their decision making, and are likely to be indifferent to online or offline promotion, so long as it is done in an honest and politically correct manner.

Habitual - 'die hard' traditionalists, who are reluctant to try new things out.

Social - have a strong preference for the social interactions and 'buzz' of the real world.

Two more factors must still be evaluated - Familiarity and Confidence (as in ES Test), and a new item, Company Commitment.

FAMILIARITY AND CONFIDENCE (brand image)
This is a slightly modified version of de Kare-Silver's terminology, with greater emphasis on brand strength, and level of competition. It is a measure of how well understood a product or service is, what level of trust and confidence people have in it, and how strong its brand image is. The stronger the brand, or the greater the familiarity with the product, the more must be invested to maintain the brand. Or for new entrants, the more that must be spent on promotion to be able to compete.
Scored on a scale 0 to 10 (strongest brand).

COMPANY COMMITMENT AND RESOURCES
This is an indicator of a company's commitment to a product or service, and the resources it has to achieve this. The level of commitment is strongly influenced by the company's strategic position for a particular product/service.
At one extreme the web site may be a new initiative to replace an element of an existing 'bricks and mortar' business, or it may be simply being run as a complementary activity to add value or support the existing business - or any shade in between (Kumar 32). The strategic position can thus critically affect the determination and resources that a company may have to commit in order to continue.
Scored on a scale 0 to 10 (maximum commitment).

All the above four factors must be carefully evaluated for a product/service and target audience, and scored out of 10. The four factors may then be used to indicate where the focus of promotion should be on the chart in Fig. 4.4.

The Product Type and Consumer Attributes are aligned along the Virtual Physical axis, while Familiarity and Confidence, and Company Commitment, which relate to issues of cost, are aligned along the Relative Cost axis. This is quite different from the standard ES Test which sums the individual scores, but applies a weighting factor of three times to the Consumer Attributes value.

The chart, Fig. 4.6 below shows the complete model for optimising promotion (MOP). The magnitudes of the Product and Consumer values indicate the relative proportion of online versus offline activity, while the Familiarity and Commitment scores indicate whether high cost or low cost promotion methods are most appropriate.

As applied in the ES Test, these factors (the three original factors, at least) are used to determine the suitability of a product or service for being sold online. Here they are being used to suggest strategic promotion quadrants in the chart below, on the assumption that the web site we are trying to promote is already offering the product or service anyway. It could be argued that low 'virtual' scores would show, that a product should not be sold through the web site, and therefore the online dimension is irrelevant. However, many businesses use their web sites to provide an integrated 'shop window' on all their activities, including products and services that may be sold primarily offline. When advertising the web site, it is proposed that the choice of media type should reflect this balance of the physical and the virtual.

Fig. 4.6 A Conceptual Model For Optimising Promotion Planning (MOP)

We can try out the concept with a specific example - say an online bookseller. Taking the values given by de Kare-Silver for books, we have:

Product Type - 8
Familiarity and Confidence - 7
Consumer Attributes - 8 (after adjustment from a scale of 0-30 to 0-10)

and for the Company Commitment score, we might consider two possibilities:

a large dedicated online bookstore - score 9
a small dealer or affiliate who may sell books as a secondary business - score 2

The above situation could then be represented like this:

Fig. 4.7 Example Of Model Used For Two Different Types of Bookseller

The above chart shows a primary choice of online media, but note that 20% of the scores for both Product and Consumer Attributes were physically oriented (10 - 8), suggesting that a small amount of the budget might be spent offline. The Familiarity score pointed towards the higher cost quadrants, and the Company Commitment, for a dedicated bookseller was high, reinforcing the need to commit to expensive high quality promotion.

On the other hand, the affiliate bookseller who is not so dependent on winning or maintaining market share, can adopt a low cost, low volume response strategy. He can concentrate on low level search engine promotion, link building, email, and possibly printed mail shots and press releases. However, because the affiliate is dealing with products high in Familiarity, he is in a very competitive area, and will not achieve high volumes. If he can focus on a niche market segment - thereby reducing the Familiarity value in the microcosm - he might win success by achieving stronger branding amongst a specialist audience.

It must be emphasised that this model is intended for use as a guide only - to provide a framework with which to evaluate many of the different factors involved in deciding how to allocate a promotional budget, and where the focus of attention should be. It is not intended as a promotional planning 'calculator'.

It is recommended that this model should be tested by other users in practical situations, to ascertain if it can assist in the decision making process. The exact definitions of the factors and their relative weightings will probably need further refinement.