What Influences Your Marketplace Brand?

What do you stand for?

Building Your Marketplace Brand

An essential aspect of an eMarketplace platform is building an ethos or brand.

Your marketplace brand encompasses an understanding of what the marketplace stands for, and the team, systems, and decisions backing the marketplace.

The underpinning foundations behind your brand will fundamentally make or break your eMarketplace business.

For example, a business might be founded on providing extreme levels of customer service and support—for example, think about Zappos and the guarantees they provide to customers.

Even a brand new service representative has the authority to provide free returns or refunds, replacements to a certain dollar amount, etc.

This is what Zappos stands for. If you ask customers who’ve interacted with Zappos, they’ll tell you pretty consistently that their experience involved high levels of customer support.

Zappos is a good example of an eCommerce marketplace that grew around this promise and brand identity of providing this excellent customer service.

Your marketplace brand should ultimately be decided by your values within the marketplace. The governance of the system and the business need to reflect those key values.

For Zappos, their values are having the best customer service in the world. Therefore, they know their end-customer service representative needs to be able to make decisions when in communication with the customer.

Present amazing quality

Offering High Quality Services

The eMarketplace also needs to be intelligent, and oriented around allowing the customers to not have to interact with someone if they don’t want to, or self-service.

Self-service is a key factor for an eMarketplace platform. You want to give your customers access to self-service and support in a way that’s smart and logical.

Fundamentally, this becomes part of the advertising and the vendor relationships.

The vendors who are offering their products within the marketplace understand that their brands aren’t going to be tarnished by offering their products within your marketplace.

They know that your marketplace brand stands for integrity and high levels of customer service and usability.

Consider the impact on brand perception

Streamlining the Experience for Your Marketplace Brand

Your brand influences the presentation of your marketplace website, which in turn influences the perception of your brand.

When a visitor is coming to your platform for the first time, or even if they’re a repeat customer, they expect their experience to be streamlined and simple. They don’t want complicated steps or have to waste time trying to figure out how to do something.

Oftentimes, if a process is too complicated, users will leave the site and never return, even if you offer really great products in your marketplace.

You can reassure them, though, through your branding and the traits of your marketplace platform, that you leverage the latest technology, test everything to make sure it’s working properly, and that the integrations and self-service aspects are fully fleshed out.

Part of using the latest technology is having intelligent systems. Users will also have a much better experience if, while testing everything, you try to break it in advance so you can flush out anything that might not be obvious until it gets into production.

If there is an issue with the software, this flows back into the marketplace brand. People’s perceptions will be influenced by their experience with your business, and they’ll associate that experience, even if it’s only one experience, with your entire brand.

You build this internal representation and this makes its way out into what the marketplace is—is this an organization that’s constantly growing and improving, or is it a stagnant marketplace that’s just holding on and declining over time?

This is where the internal team will significantly influence the marketplace brand.

Tailor your presentation

Visually Presenting Your Marketplace Brand

Interacting with your vendors is good idea for a marketplace. We also recommend that you look at key aspects that are needed in the industry and any segments you’re representing.

Oftentimes, there can be different tones to a marketplace brand, such that you can have a business-oriented tone for a business version of the marketplace, and a consumer tone for a consumer-oriented version.

There can be a slight difference in the color scheme between the two, to represent a business and a consumer side of things.

Similarly, with different segments or parts of the market, there’s different imagery and styling that you’ll want to present. Tailoring your presentation to the segment allows sellers and buyers to quickly assess whether your platform has what they are looking for.

As soon as a visitor comes to your site, they’re going to subconsciously make an assessment as to whether or not the page is valuable to them. Therefore, the branding needs to capture that.

At the core of the business, there needs to be a crystallized offering and focus on what’s important to the eMarketplace platform. What do you want to represent with your presentation and styling for your brand? This is a key differentiator within the marketplace space.

For example, if you go to Amazon, their brand presentation is commoditization and reliability. You can almost think of Amazon as the “UPS” of the marketplace—where affordable prices and logistics are top priorities.

On the other hand, there are marketplaces that focus on high quality, so they’re not emphasizing lower costs and best logistics. They’re emphasizing highest quality guarantees and white glove service.

This is something you can pick up on instantly from the marketplace brand. You can physically see it when you go to Amazon. There’s a different feel in the brand, just like you would experience when you go to a fast food place versus a five star restaurant.

It’s the same thing when you go to a different marketplace eCommerce platform. Your brand sends a message to your users within a few hundred milliseconds of interacting with your marketplace, and then it’s going to be reinforced throughout their interaction.

This also extends to your internal team. The brand roots itself from the core principles of your organization.

Therefore, it’s critical to decide what those foundational principles are, and what the differentiating factor is within your space. These are things that can be adjusted over time, but you first need to set a bedrock to build on.

Fundamentally, though, these ought to be things you know going in, and that you continue to build on over time.

Best practices for marketplace brand development

Implementing Your Brand into the Marketplace Software

When developing a marketplace brand, it’s usually best to work with a team that can evaluate and implement a software solution for your eMarketplace platform.

To do this, the team you work with will need to understand the full context of how the software fits into the operations of your business.

They should also be able to advise you on how to execute on other key areas of the business and get your marketplace brand in place as part of the software implementation.

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