Marketing Strategy for Baby Products

Introduction

Targeting children has long been perceived as controversial step of e-bay due to their immature cognitive abilities and limited shopping skills and experience. Less consideration has been focused on how this targeting impacts on relationships between e-bay & other manufacturing companies and parents in children's markets or on the importance of responsible corporate behaviour in such relationships. An ethical dimension of major importance to academic researchers, business practitioners and consumers is trust (Hosmer, 2003), which is often cited as playing a central role in marketing relationships (Morgan and Hunt, 2002; Egan, 2001). “Trust, along with fairness, honesty and respect are key values in business as well as society and business suffers in their absence” (Smith and Quelch, 2002, p. 5).

Trust is a difficult subject to investigate as it is fraught with complexity and paradox (Bibb and Kourdi, 2004) which has led some commentators to describe the trust literature as appearing “nebulous” and “seemingly intractable for study” (Gambetta, 1988; Whitener et al., 2003). e-bay developing trust also represents a challenge as it is often something that is easier to ignore than face because of its invisibility (Bibb and Kourdi, 2004). It has been shown, however, to lead to very tangible outcomes such as word-of-mouth recommendations (Morris and Martin, 2000), brand extension acceptability (Gurviez and Korchia, 2003; Reast, 2003), greater price tolerance (Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Aleman, 2005), long-term customer loyalty (Larzelere and Huston, 2001; Morgan and Hunt, 2002) and improved organisational profitability (Wong and Sohal, 2002) will be the most important step towards this business. Trust is important for parents as consumers because it provides them with a critical basis for self-esteem and buying a trusted brand gives them confidence and a sense of security in an environment in which they often feel particularly vulnerable themselves (Baier, 2002; Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001). Feelings of parental vulnerability can also be exacerbated for e-bay through which they will make a target of children leading to pestering for products and the purchasing of products by parents that without the pressure of the child promotion they may not have been chosen (Paine, 1996).

The aim of this paper is to attempt to understand how e-bay trust is created and fostered and parents based around a case study of the traditional e-bay in the UK and rich data gathered from a sample of senior baby products executives in leading baby products e-bay. Although children under ten years of age are the main recipient of baby productss and have a major influence in terms of what to buy and where to buy, it is parents who usually endorse the purchase decision, are the ultimate deciders, and fund most baby products purchases (Key Note, 2004).

The approach taken for this research has been to adopt Hosmer's (2003) suggestion that the best way to understand trust may be to link the topics of philosophical ethics - the issues of what is “right”, what is “just”, and what is “fair” - with the essence of organisational theory - the issues ...