Recently, marketplaces in Russia have begun to capture consumer behavior rapidly. Platforms have become not just a convenient way of buying, but practically a way of life. To purchase the product, just click the button — quickly, as usual, “with a guarantee”. However, for companies that invest in creating a conscious brand with a philosophy and values, such services represent not just vast opportunities, but also a serious threat. How to maintain customer loyalty and not lose control of your positioning?
Why do consumers choose marketplaces?
The marketplace is a powerful marketing machine with well-designed algorithms that make consumers dependent on the system itself. Logistics, delivery, and customer protection are just a shell that hides a whole layer of extensive opportunities for product promotion. Today, electronic trading platforms can do a lot:
- reach millions of users in minutes;
- perform accurate retargeting;
- offer an upsale at the right moment;
- react to the customer’s behavior faster than you can open the CRM.
Brands should understand that entering marketplaces can quickly generate turnover, but quantity should not prevail over quality. It is important to have a long-term strategy behind the speed and volume, in order not to lose customer loyalty.
Brand strategies to increase customer loyalty
Before entering the marketplace, brand owners must decide for themselves what is their priority: working long hours or chasing volume and fast sales. These are two fundamentally different strategies that require a different approach to promotion and positioning. Before you can display your product on the platform, you need to answer a few questions:
- Which is more important to you: fast money or a long reputation?
- Which approach do you choose: to dump for the sake of volume or to preserve the value of the product?
- Which actions do you prefer: to build partner networks and a brand, including offline, or just ship boxes and remain no name?
These are real choices that affect the entire vector of development, because the marketplace today is a showcase, a rating, and a judge. And it’s not on the side of brands.
The fate of brands inside the marketplace
E-commerce platforms have long been a place of chaotic trading: from official shipments to mass market consumer goods, from intermediaries-resellers to “one-day deals” with AliExpress. And it’s hard to stay heard in this noise if you’re not just a supplier, but a brand with meaning, a team, and development investments.
Everything on the marketplace is based on reviews. One custom comment — and you lose your position, dumping from a competitor — and you have to lower the price. These are risks for those who really invest in the product. Not in repackaging, but in quality, textures, flavors, composition, design, and philosophy.
In the future, electronic trading platforms will have to rethink their strategy and decide what meanings they bring to the country: to create high-quality products or to follow trends?
How can a brand survive and win on the marketplace?
The marketplace is not evil, but you need to work with it as with a complex ecosystem. And in this process there are important rules:
- Follow the strategy. Not chasing volume, but building a presence based on the overall positioning of the brand.
- Do not dump. Keep the price, respect yourself, your partners and the real cost.
- Communicate with the customer. Use the brand’s personal account, answer questions, and build trust even within the framework of algorithms.
- Use the platform’s tools: banners, push notifications, upsale cards, analytics, retargeting – all this is acceptable if you have a strategy.
- Conduct external work: the marketplace does not build a brand. You build it yourself — in social networks, personal blog, media, through packaging and customer support.
And most importantly, remember that you are a brand. If you are not just selling, but creating, it requires other solutions.
For example, you can set the following priorities for yourself:
- do not play “the cheapest”;
- don’t go to a promo that devalues;
- don’t be silent when they write in the comments — the brand responds personally;
- build offline partnerships by giving partners more favorable terms than an online platform;
- do not exclude marketplaces, do not adjust to them, but integrate them into your strategy.
Marketplaces are a challenge, a tool, an environment where you can scale. However, you can lose everything in it if you don’t know who you are. The winner is not the one who is louder, but the one who is steadier.
By Snezhana Lebedinskaya, founder of the professional eco-tanning service StarTanPremium and author of Biollagen by StarTanPremium, which neutralizes the smell of self-tanning