Marketing and Logistics: a powerful duo for your e-commerce

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What do marketing and logistics have in common? Read on and find out!

Brazilian e-commerce is experiencing a period of consolidation and is showing increasingly impressive financial results. In 2018 alone, more than R$133 billion was invoiced , according to data from Ebit/Nielsen, an increase of 18% compared to the previous year.

With results like these, it’s only natural that a growing number of canada phone number list are starting to invest in the sector. It’s no wonder that there are already over 930,000 websites dedicated to e-commerce in Brazil. To create a lasting and scalable business amidst so much competition, it’s essential to pay attention to fundamental aspects such as marketing and logistics. And what do these two (seemingly distinct) concepts have in common? Read on and find out!

Here you will find information about:

What is Marketing?
What is Logistics?
Why integrate Marketing and Logistics?
How to integrate Marketing and Logistics?
Opportunities to keep an eye on
The example of Netshoes
marketing and logistics
What is Marketing?
Despite what many people think, marketing is not “just” about encouraging sales. To broaden the usual understanding of the term a little, let’s use a definition created by the American Marketing Association . For the organization, marketing “is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offers that have value for consumers , customers, partners and society in general”. You can see that marketing involves a series of processes, right?

What is Logistics?
In short, logistics is a strategic process of acquiring, moving and storing materials/parts/inventory. This concept aims to serve customers with the best cost-benefit ratio for the company. In an excerpt from the book “ Logistics and Supply Chain Management ”, professor Martin Christopher, an expert in the field, says that it is possible to understand logistics as a “planning structure and guidance that aims to create a single plan for the flow of products and information”. But what does this have to do with marketing? That is what we are going to talk about from now on!

Why integrate Marketing and Logistics?
Thinking about Marketing and Logistics separately is a surefire recipe for trouble. Let's give an example to make it more understandable. Imagine a fictitious e-commerce company called XYZ . With its physical headquarters in the northeast, the online store XYZ works in the fashion niche. When it comes to advertising its products on Google and social media, the company decides to target the ad to the south of the country, as it wants to increase sales in the region.

However, e-commerce company XYZ cannot compete with the delivery costs of companies based in the South (or even the Southeast) and, because of this, the money invested in advertising does not return in sales. The reason for this? The company did not take into account the cost of shipping (one of the aspects of logistics) when creating the advertising strategy. Marketing did not “talk” to logistics.

This is one of the reasons why your business's marketing and logistics need to go hand in hand. If your company has well-defined sectors, it is important to encourage integration between the different areas of the business to prevent areas from working in isolation, without a comprehensive understanding of the organization.

How to start integrating Marketing and Logistics?
How to integrate marketing and logistics?
Have you ever heard of the “4 Ps of Marketing”? This famous concept serves to summarize four essential points of a marketing strategy. They are: product, price, promotion and place. However, according to the aforementioned professor Martin Christopher, the first three Ps tend to receive more attention, while the last one (place) ends up getting less attention.

And what does this have to do with integrating marketing and logistics? Well, the place corresponds to the concept of “location” where you offer your product. In today’s world, the place can be both online and offline. The important point is that you need to offer the product in places where your customer is. Remember the example of e-commerce XYZ: by disregarding the “place” aspect of the marketing strategy, the company did not think about the logistics of deliveries and wasted money.