Never underestimate the power of an Oreo.
"Faces light up," exults Norma Larkin, vice president of e-marketing for Nabisco. The wattage in her own smile spikes as she explains what is unquestionably one of the most successful branding stories in the history of consumer packaged goods.
But branding wasn't enough to carry Nabisco into the new economy. Nor were the company's processing plants and distributors, its sales channel and formidable deep pockets.
No surprises there. After all, food packagers are little more than an evolutionary link between the medieval grain mill and the Wendy's drive-through. They're not old economy so much as old old economy: factories, delivery trucks, and retail distributors. This is one reason Nabisco turned to outside professionals for help with its e-commerce efforts.
The journey was no simpler for Vertical Networks, a venture born and bred in the fevered throes of the new economy. Vertical's key productâ€"integrated communications platformsâ€"is the very tool that enables hundreds of enterprises to put the Web to work.
John C. Zimmerman, Vertical's vice president of finance and operations, doesn't mince words: "R&D is our core competency." Yet despite the company's enormous technical resources, experience, and know-how, Zimmerman hired out when it came time to develop a Web business.
Why would a company like Nabisco, with near-bottomless financial resources and a palace-guard approach to its brands and channel, trust outsiders with its Web business? Even more intriguingly, why would a technology-driven company like Vertical Networks, whose stated goal is to integrate the Internet into 100 percent of its business, turn to a canned technology over which the company has no ownership or control?
A new breed of one-stop e-commerce service providers offer the answers: speed to market and phenomenal cost savings. Bricks-and-mortar enterprises can find themselves open for business on the Web in as little as two weeks, though typical projects span six to 12 weeks. Costs vary widely depending on the scope of the project. Most service providers charge a setup fee, often in the neighborhood of US$50,000, then a monthly maintenance fee. Other providers take a cut of transactions.
Companies can save 70 percent to 80 percent of the price of an in-house commerce solution. And the savings in aspirin can make it even more worth your while.
