Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand the correlation with e-commerce.

Gerrit Kolb: Typically, e-commerce solutions deal with making the product catalog available through a website. You end up having a grid where you can pick which product you want, what color you want, what quality you want, and what size you want. Then you have a shopping cart that lets you check out. This is really the cash register from a brick-and-mortar store perspective. What is missing, and this is something that is key to all the e-commerce solutions today, is everything that drives your customer to your website. That actually deals with motivating people to buy from you.

Let me give you an example. You can divide the e-commerce market into three different categories. If you know a product name that you want to buy and if you know what product you want to purchase, you would typically only go to Amazon on the short tail or eBay on the long tail. Those are the platform players that deal mostly with making products available to the customers. On the top end, you have the brands where it is really all about brand management. They have to be extremely concise and have a specific product offering. They’re starting to sell directly from the website.

In the middle, you have all the retailers. The retailers are stuck in the middle because they don’t get any traffic because if people know what they want, they go to the platform anyway. If people are looking for a specific brand, they are going to the brands. The retailers are losing out on everything else. They don’t really have anything to offer. If you type in a product in Google search, you won’t end up at the retailer’s site. You will end up either at the brand site or the Amazon site. The retailers are stuck. They’ve to become visible. They’ve to be engaging and make sure that people have the opportunity to shop from products from multiple brands in a way that makes them actually buy from specific retailers.

There are two ways you might do this. Number one is, you tell a story where you’re not looking for specific shoes from Adidas, but you’re actually telling a story about the marathon runner that happened to wear specific Adidas shoes as well as a specific shirt. He might have had food from a specific vendor. That’s actually combining multiple products into a story. That does two things for you. Number one, is you’re engaging people who are actually runners versus the people that are attached to the brand. You are also getting away from the fact that people are comparing products. The other thing it does is, it makes you visible because Google won’t rank you as visible in the search result based on the fact that you carry a specific product. They will rank you based on the content of the story that you have.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia
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