Positioning of Industries in Cyberspace; Evaluation of Web Sites Using Correspondence Analysis

In todays extremely competitive markets it is crucial for companies to strategically position their brands, products and services relative to their competitors. With the emerging trend in internationalization of companies especially SMEs and the growing use of the Internet with this regard, great amount of attention has been turned to effective involvement of the Internet channel in the marketing mix of the companies. This has introduced a new term of market space (the Web) versus the traditional battleground of marketplace in which companies compete with each other. The growth of presence in the market space has been exponential, both in general and within specific industries. Thus bringing to attention the importance of Web presence and that it is crucial for companies to strategically regard competition in market space. It is important to understand that positioning on the Net is very different and requires its own set of strategies as part of the new marketing paradigm. This study goes towards addressing the need to understand and measure the nature of positioning of company Web sites on the Internet. The aim of the study is to introduce a statistical technique to compare the positioning of Web sites, in and acrossindustries. With this regard a group of Web sites from the home appliances manufacturing industry was selected and the technique of correspondence analysis was applied to produce maps which can be studied and interpreted. The results indicated that either based on company strategies or accidentally, these Web sites are positioned differently and may follow or affect different marketing policies of their owners. At the end, the implications of this technique for management and how it can be used by new home appliance manufacturers or those who want to compare their sites with the ones of their competitors, in order to benchmark and/or revise their policies and strategies have been discussed.

Keywords:

Ecommerce , Internet Marketing , Correspondence Analysis , Cyberspace , Market space , Internationalization , Home Appliances , SME