Dhonuk Marketing in an Emerging Market

Dhounk.com: Marketing in an Emerging Market

Key Issues:

The key issues that dhonuk.com face right now following its in-depth survey:

• Formulating a clear positioning strategy in market like India where art was not a commonplace consumer item.

• Dhonuk.com must decide what their focal target market will be.

• Does Dhonuk.com want to focus on the interactive “social media” setting of their site or be place for consumers to research and buy art?

Key Recommendations:

• Position themselves as an interactive website meant for occasional the buyers who were from the emerging middle class.

• Focus on highlighting a combination of “abstract” and “figurative” art as their main product types.

• Present Dhonuk.com as a website that offers their customers value by being interactive, informative and convenient.

Since the early 1990s, India has gradually embraced a more consumerist culture, which mainly has been a result of the country’s improved economic performance. The annual disposable income has grown to $1,061 billion (U.S.) against an annual gross income of $1,119 billion (U.S.). The middle class, which was expected to grow 13% by 2009-10, was the biggest factor in the increase in consumer consumption in India (see Appendix A). Another significant factor of the middle class in India was the revelation of the emergence of the “youthful, gung-ho generation” that had a desire to look and feel good.

These growth factors of the social class structure in India, should lead Dhonuk.com to focus the positioning of the company on this growing middle class. Although the middle class was not necessarily made up of “art enthusiast”, it presented a group of people who were interested in finding out more about the culture of art. Currently, Dhounk.com presents themselves as an online platform for art lovers, art enthusiasts and artists. This structure limits their market reach and ignores the larger segment of India. The survey conducted by Dhonuk.com presents a good picture of the make-up of their ideal customer/user. As seen from the selected results of the survey in Appendix B, the consumers that are attracted to Dhonuk.com are passionate, knowledgeable, and very socially active. At the same time, this group is occasional buyers of art and is not very concerned with self-image in relation to purchasing products (see Appendix C). These occasional buyers are independent and are not influenced by what others think of their tastes in products. Many of the purchases of art pieces they