Black Entertainment Television Case Study

BET.com

Black Entertainment Television was about to launch the company’s new website BET.com and they needed do decide the positioning of the website to target either the African-American Market, the Urban market or the combination of the two. Even though BET network was primarily focused on African-American community, they needed to tap in the urban market in order to not lose them to competitors in the dot.com era.  

BET brand was well recognized in both the segments but the main focus of the company was to make their logo as a brand name for African Americans. There were 6.6 million African American internet users which was just 23% and hence the market was underpenetrated by other competitors. Additionally, African Americans were fastest-growing online segment and had showed an affinity for culturally oriented content which was an area of expertise of BET.com’s producers. Competitors were primarily providing content for this segment but they had niche expertise and didn’t have the range of BET cable network and superior funding for programming and marketing. BET’s ability to provide exposure and promotion to upcoming artists was a real competitive advantage especially against other African-American websites. African-American media was substantially less expensive than the general market media and hence company can focus more on the offline promotions than on the online promotions. One reason why this market was underserved was the lack of computers in the target audience and hence BET have to invest heavily to become one or partner with Internet Service Providers and PC manufacturers. This could be a potential challenge as it would come with a lot of risks. Another issue was with the behavior of African American users using the internet. They look themselves as a Web users primarily when surfing the internet and not as an African-American. The criticism for the website would be of being too much “black”.