0614 Singapore real estate condos,apartments,houses advertised by internet property agency asiahomes.com, Singapore

PUTTING A BRAND ONLINE
This week we republish an article profiling The Sharper Image's efforts
to move its offline brand online. The article also includes some real-
world marketing tips that the company learned when it moved online.
Also this week we cover what Forrester Research says are the challenges
ahead for ecommerce sites faced with dropping numbers of online
shoppers.
MOVING YOUR BRAND ONLINE: HOW SHARPER IMAGE DID IT ~~~
http://www.webpromote.com/wpwsrch/detail.asp?iid=May2000vol2&aid=1

Specialty retailer The Sharper Image has a unique, carefully crafted
brand image as a "cool place for fun products," says Kathryn Grant, the
company's senior manager for Internet strategy. In recent years, the
retailer's challenge has been to transfer that sense of fun and
excitement to the Web, Grant told an audience at the Chicago
Association of Direct Marketing's recently held DM Days 2000 conference
( http://www.cadm.org ).

In her presentation, Grant outlined how the company made the
transition, a transition she says has been successful, based on The
Sharper Image's 479% Internet sales increase from 1998 to 1999. The
industry average year-to-year Internet sales increase is 300%,
according to Grant.

* BUILDING A BRAND
The Sharper Image began building its unique brand in 1977 with its
first product, a digital watch that the company advertised in a jogging
magazine. That item grossed $750,000, and by 1979, the company had a
12-product catalog with other distinctive, technology-oriented
products.

Now The Sharper Image sends out 40 million catalogs a year and has 90
retail stores. As the company grew, maintaining its brand remained a
priority. "We sacrificed a lot of profitability in favor of advertising
to establish our brand," Grant says.

Sharper Image's brand is also built on its exclusive product offerings.
The company started designing its own products in 1993, and now 30% of
its revenue comes from in-house products. "You need to establish
yourself as a unique place to find your product or service," Grant
says.

* MARKETING ACROSS CHANNELS
The Sharper Image first went online in 1995, and in 1996 got its own
domain name. The company has been doing online direct marketing since
1998, including email marketing to its own customers. Now it emails
offers to its customers two or three times a month, Grant says.

The company uses its various channels to support its brand and to
support each other. For example, the company spends $25 million a year
to produce and mail catalogs that also drive traffic to its stores and
to its website. The Sharper Image advertises its dot-com business on
its storefronts and its bags, and the website uses text and photos from
its catalog to create continuity and reduce production costs. The
company also emails coupons to its online customers that are only valid
at its store locations (the message encourages consumers to forward it
to a friend if they don't live near a store).

Three-dimensional features on The Sharper Image website support the
company's brand image as a technological leader, as well as duplicate
the fun environment of the store online, Grant says. Consumers can view
Sharper Image products in 3D, and see some of them move, such as a
rotating CD rack.

Similarly, The Sharper Image's auction site, opened in March 1999,
duplicates its entertaining store environment--also supporting the
brand image. Only available via the main Sharper Image site, the
auction site also helps the company manage inventory more effectively
than it can with outlet stores. The Sharper Image seeds its auctions
occasionally with small numbers of new or best-selling products, which
encourages repeat visits.

~~~ GOING ONLINE: TIPS FROM THE SHARPER IMAGE ~~~

Though her presentation at the recently held Chicago Association of
Direct Marketing's DM Days 2000 was titled "Bringing Your Successful
Brand Online," Kathryn Grant, senior manager for Internet strategy with
The Sharper Image, touched on many aspects of online business-building
and marketing. Here are some of the lessons The Sharper Image has
learned:

* If your company has expertise or resources from other channels, use
them on the Web. To support its direct marketing operations, The
Sharper Image had its own fulfillment operation, product artwork and
copy writing resources. All of those resources now also support the
company's online operation. Besides providing consistent branding,
leveraging those in-house resources has helped keep online costs down
and enabled the division to be profitable from day one, Grant says.

* Use the online channel to expand your customer base. Thanks to
partnerships with America Online and affiliate management operations
like Linkshare ( http://www.linkshare.com ), Grant says 70% of The
Sharper Image's online customers are new to file. Online customers are
also slightly younger than its other customers, which positions the
company well for the future, Grant says.

* Reward customers who conduct business via the low-overhead online
channel with Web-only discounts. The Sharper Image recently offered
online customers a $20 discount on any order over $50. But the high
discount didn't gouge margins because the customers placed large
orders, Grant says.

* Personalized email pulls better. The Sharper Image tested two
different messages sent to customers who had previously bought its
ionic breeze air filter. The messages announced the availability of an
upgraded version of the product. One message explicitly referred to
customers' previous air filter purchase, while the other didn't. The
one that referred to the previous purchase had a 50% higher response
rate, according to Grant.

~~~~~ NEWS SPOTLIGHT ~~~~~

TIME FOR SITES TO DELIGHT NEARS

Dropping numbers of new online shoppers will force companies to shift
their focus to getting existing customers to keep buying, according to
a report from Forrester Research Inc. ( http://www.forrester.com ) by
Joseph L. Butt Jr.

His report, "The Web Peak Passes--The Fight to Delight Begins," says
the number of new online shopping households will peak this year at 11
million, and drop to 2.6 million by 2004. The result will be online
shoppers who are jaded, and companies scrambling to distinguish
themselves to these consumers. Customer service expectations will rise
to include cross-channel presence, personalization, package tracking,
recommendation engines, configurators and call centers.

Forrester says that to get existing customers to keep buying, online
companies will:

* Measure and improve the consumer experience on their websites, based
on the consumer's perspective.

* Manage customer relations by collecting and analyzing data from all
customer interactions.

* Mine all customer data to identify profitable customers.