Long-term Strategy for Website Is Unrealistic?

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Nowadays, planning a strategic objectives for a website is really challenging either for online shopping or business/company, marketers need to create a better strategy to suits with the company goals as well as the market itself. Jones (n.d.) claimed that long term strategy stands to help the organization as a guidelines to achieve the success and profit. In my opinion refers to her statement, this is a basic knowledge that every companies put as a top priority however, when it comes to the website or internet basis systems long-term strategy could be something that need to be re-consider. The changing of marketplace is the only reason why long-term strategy is unrealistic to be applied in a website. Long term strategy will put the website under situation where all the design, contents, and systems will remaining the same. Visitor is really demanding on how market is changing, so personally I would say that I prefer to visit website that has variation in terms of design based on the trend in the market.

Let’s take an example of fashion designer brand Gucci, before on their website is only provide information about online shopping for US and Europe country however, in 2017 Gucci starting to realize that e-commerce in Chinese market is high that’s why they turn around to created strategy for

Chinese by released WeChat shopping pay and Gucci website transformation into Chinese. It is clearly be seen that if Gucci keep their long term strategy to strict for western country only they will not get more profit from other countries who can afford their products.

On the other hand Reichheld & Schefter (2000) argued that designing a website objectives is not mostly focusing on the target market itself but rather focusing on how create a new vibrant website with good content and realistic plan to get customers loyalty. I strongly agree with the statement because by applying short-term we can easily monitor and maintain the data however, as Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart (2010) stated that, “strategy refers to a firm's contingent plan as to which business model it will use” it means that we need to go back and see what is our business model for example: if we are B2B or C2C business model than we need to arrange and also focus on the target market since the profit mostly come from consumer as our target market. As we notice that short-term strategy on website can be email subscribers, ads, or consumers request all of these short-term strategy can be supported by long-term objectives for instance getting in touch with subscribers for 1 year long to get consumers loyalty. So, I would say that in terms of getting win-win solution on how we can arrange business model align with the website strategy is by focusing on the market research update and create a balancing short-term and long term strategy.

Reference:

Casadesus-Masanell, R., & Ricart, J. E. (2010). From strategy to business models and onto tactics. Long range planning, 43(2-3), 195-215.

Jones, J. (n.d.). How to Determine a Strategic Plan for Your Long-Term Objectives.

Reichheld, F. F., & Schefter, P. (2000). E-loyalty: your secret weapon on the web. Harvard business review, 78(4), 105-113.