Camper Shoes struggling with its marketing strategy. Camper Shoes is a company producing fashionable shoes at a premium that depend heavily on innovative design, strong brand-image and quirky online and magazine advertising promotion. In 2012 Camper Shoes announced that unit shoe sales at its own branded stores and other high street shoe and fashion retail stores had fallen for the fifth successive year in a row. The fall has been largely attributed to customers switching to buying Camper Shoes from the two dominant online shoe retailers Amazon.com and Zappos.com. Camper Shoes supply these two huge online only retailers with large volumes of their branded shoes at reduced profit margins; this business-to-business marketing forms an important part of its overall marketing strategy. Camper Shoes also has its own website which is very successful in its Spanish home market, but relative unknown by consumers outside of Spain.

REFERENCE: www.IBBusinessandManagement.com

1. Define e-commerce [2 marks] 2. Explain why Camper Shoes may be classified as having both a business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing strategy. [4 marks] 3. Discuss the costs and benefits of e-commerce to businesses like Camper Shoes and shoe consumers. [6 marks]

4. Analyse the effect of e-commerce on the marketing mix of Camper Shoes. [8 marks]