eBay
A strategic review of communications
eBay is the World’s Online Marketplace offering an online platform where individuals and businesses can trade items in multiple categories. Among those, the Clothing-Shoes-Accessories (CSR) category is one of the most important.
Challenges
eBay Europe faces fierce competition in the field of CSR with multiple online retailers, discounters, outlets and private sales websites. While benefiting from a leading marketplace position overall, eBay might suffer from being compared to specialists in specific categories. Therefore eBay Europe needed to better understand its actual competitive position in order to develop appropriate branded initiatives to face the major threats and to leverage the best opportunities in CSR.
Actions
We first led a competitive brand review in the UK and German markets. For this, we conducted a qualitative brand assessment for eBay and major CSR competitors in both countries, including communications audit, visual, look & feel, tone of voice, price and discount positioning, value definition, range understanding and customer journeys.
We also reviewed existing overall eBay positioning as framework, and leveraged existing insights regarding targeted consumer segments.
This led us to identify major themes driving competitive positions, and to develop competitive mappings, with eBay positioned relative to competition, and to define possible scenarios for eBay evolution in the fields of Value proposition, Fashion expertise and Range.
As we set strategic goals and target position on the CSR market, eBay implemented a series of specific initiatives to deliver the new strategy. Among those, eBay launched in 2010 the eBay Outlet to fulfill complementary consumers’ expectations.