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Online Marketing at Big Skinny

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Wallets are small and often needs replacement, hence are natural impulse purchases often bought as gifts. Hence, Kiril started Big Skinny to offer the world’s thinnest wallets and to solve five key problems men/women have with their wallets.
- Size: their nylon fabric material was 5-7 times thinner than traditional wallets
- Weight: most weighted under an ounce, better for back and posture
- Card Pocket Size: offered extra wide pockets
- Slipperiness: wallet interiors were rubbery to reduce slipperiness
- Lack of Versatility: water resistant wallets though enough for machine wash
Kiril along with his marketing director and wife, Catherine Alexandrov was beginning to think about online marketing plans after overwhelming response to Big Skinny’s promotion glitch confirmed that consumers were ready to buy the product online. However, reaching consumers online was challenging due to high costs and other constraints.
Taking Big Skinny Online
Big Skinny had internet presence since outset, even after having their own website marketing on internet was a tough puzzle: products were sold on impulse and value primarily, attributes straightforward to showcase in person, however difficult on internet. The options were:
- Display Ads: seemed as internet’s closest equivalent to booth at street fairs, their primary model. Although display ads provided rich graphic capabilities online, it has complications too. Internet users were conditioned against display ads for they are irrelevant and irritating most of the times. Sold on pay-per impression, rather than genuine clicks, they seemed a risky choice.
- Algorithmic Search: listing of Big Skinny links in organic search results based on the proprietary ranking algorithms of search engines which usually factored occurrence & frequency of keywords, pages linking to the item, location

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