Marketing for Icon Korea, an online Channel Selling Korean Clothes
Marketing for Icon Korea, an online channel selling Korean clothes
1. Executive Summary
Our company, Icon Premier International Limited, is planning to establish a website and later a phone application for the Chinese customers who are purchasing or who are willing to purchase affordable Korean clothes. The information of clothes on our website would be directly linked to the database of the Korean brands, with Chinese translation. Korean brands typically offer online shopping domestically only.
We believe this business model would be successful. Currently no one in the China market is offering convenient, affordable and trustworthy way of shopping Korean clothes successfully. Our dedication in this specific market to solve such market gap offers us the basis to succeed, as will be analyzed later.
By adopting situation analysis, we have positioned Icon Korea as “Affordable convenient Korean fashion”. Our keys to success are to maintain good source of Korean clothes at reasonable pricing, and to target the right customers.
2. Objective
Our website, Icon Korea, is aimed to offer the most convenient and trustworthy way for Chinese customers to shop affordable Korean clothes.
3. Situation Analysis
Chinese customers perceive Korean clothing as fashionable and relatively expensive. In fact, most of the overseas products are more expensive than the domestic products in China as a result of the higher labor costs as well as the high import tax of China. However, Korean clothing is one of the exceptions – The price of the Korean clothes in Korea is often quite cheap as a result of the fierce competition of Korea’s mature fashion industry. A detailed segmented customer analysis is conducted below.
Customer Analysis
We are only analyzing customers who are interested in Korean clothes here. We have segmented the customers by age groups because the same age group usually shares similar income and behaviors when shopping for Korean clothes.
Segment Label | Age 15 – 30 | Age 30 – 50 | Age above 50 |
Benefit Sought | Affordable trended Korean fashion | Suitable Clothing | High Quality |
Second Benefit | Convenience and time-saving | High Quality | Physical store to try and pay |
Behavior Characteristics | Fast adapter of online shopping and anything new | Can adapt new way of shopping when necessary but prefer to shop in physical stores where they can see the quality of clothes | Slow adapter of online shopping; Not willing to change to new way of shopping for clothes |
Competitor Analysis
Chinese customers currently have three channels to purchase Korean clothes – Physical stores opened by individual Korean brands, physical shops with mixed Korean brands opened by individual business owners, and online shopping. In particular, online shopping could be mainly divided into two sub-categories – Taobao and Wechat run by individual business owners, and website run by individual Korean brands. The table below has demonstrated our competitor analysis.
Competitors | Physical stores of recognized brands | Physical stores of individual owners | Existing online shopping channels
| ||
Benefits offered | Authenticity; High quality; | Diversified brands; Customers can see the quality | Affordable price; Convenient | ||
Shortcomings | High price; Few choice; | Relatively higher price than online shopping; Few stores; Limited stocks; | Risk of fake clothes; Difficulty to choose among the massive sellers | Few Choice; | |
Difference in way of shopping | Traditional way of shopping | Traditional way of shopping | Online shopping | Online shopping |
Market Gap for Different Segments