Positioning of Industries in Cyberspace; Evaluation of Web Sites Using Correspondence Analysis

In today 's extremely competitive markets it is crucial for companies to strategically position their brands, products and services relative totheir competitors. with the emerging trend in internationalization of companies especially sme.s and the growing use of the internet with this regard, great amount of attention has been turned to effective involvement of the internet channel in the marketing mix of the companies. this has introduced a new term of market space (the web)versus the traditional battle ground of marketplace in which companies compete with each other. the growth of presence in the market space has been exponential, both in general and within specific industries.thus bringing to attention the importance of web presence and that itis crucial for companies to strategically regard competition in marketspace. it is important to understand that positioning on the net is very different and requires its own set of strategies as part of the new marketing paradigm. this study goes towards addressing the need tounderstand and measure the nature of positioning of company websites on the internet. the aim of the study is to introduce a statistical technique to compare the positioning of web sites, in and acrossindustries.with this regard a group of web sites from the home appliances manufacturing industry was selected and the technique ofcorrespondence analysis was applied to produce maps which can bestudied and interpreted.the results indicated that either based on company strategies oraccidentally, these web sites are positioned differently and may follow or affect different marketing policies of their owners. at the end, the implications of this technique for management and how it can be used by new home appliance manufacturers or those who want tocompare their sites with the ones of their competitors, in order to benchmark and/or revise their policies and strategies have beendiscussed.