HETIC 2008 official Online Marketing Challenge Blog

L’ÂNE GOURMET is a French e-commerce website launched in march 2008 that sells local gastronomic products and is hiring two people.

ÂNE GOURMET (literally GOURMET DONKEY) aims not only to food lovers who want to buy authentic products but also to everyone looking for an original gift idea. On the French on-line market, the competition is led by BIEN MANGER (bienmanger.com), a website launched in 2001.

Web site’s ergonomics and usability are the main strengths to arouse the enthusiasm on the donkey mascot. The French map, as an interactive product finder, already appears to be its « killer feature ». Upstream of site launch, a viral marketing campaign relayed by various influential bloggers and social media, was led using a video and a blog recounting all about ÂNE GOURMET’s genesis. On the fringes of the challenge, an e-mailing campaign towards 15,000 targets will be sent while PR operations should start.

ADWORDS campaign will drive highly targeted and converting audience in order to increase turnover.

Created in 2007 in LYON (2^nd biggest city in France), PNEXT is a French company that sells Nintendo’s goodies via its website (www.p-nintendo.com) and is managed by the two owners and only employees.

Nintendo’s goodies market started in the mid 80’s when the Japanese brand invaded the video games’ market. However, French Nintendo’s lovers have always met difficulties to find products on their local market. Typical Nintendo’s enthusiast profile is a 16 to 25 years-old French-speaking European male inhabitant. PNEXT has no Nintendo-oriented competitors but it has to face not only various goodies e-tailers but also many EBAY stores.

Due to its youth, PNSTORE only starts to be indexed by search engines and since no kind of campaign has been performed so far, traffic mainly comes from referring websites such as P-Nintendo.com.

ADWORDS campaign will drive highly targeted and converting audience in order to increase turnover.

Studying in HETIC, we are daily in touch with advertisers willing to communicate on the Web. Therefore, finding a business partner in the Google Online Marketing Challenge purpose appears to be much more laborious than we had thought.

After considerating every opportunities within HETIC’s partners network, we quickly realized that few of them were meeting our main criteria : an advertiser acting on a niche market.

To find the perfect candidate, we started our searches with the help of websites directories such as DMOZ, with no success. That’s why we successfully decided to seek within our respective social networks (family, friends, business contacts, etc.).

Finally, signing-up business partners for the four HETIC teams wil have taken a whole month that made us modify our planning by reducing time initially dedicated to strategy brainstorming.