Boots Unlimited: Getting a Foot in the Door (A)

Abstract

BootsUnlimited.com (BU) is a website offering custom-made footwear. Customers can choose from a wide variety of styles and can also create new styles based on their exact specifications. The company instructs customers on how to provide 20 different foot and calf measurements, and from those measurements, the footwear is made in a Thai production facility. BU products cater to the custom boot market and to very different segments, and the brothers who co-own the family business have designed a Google AdWords campaign for their company to target each segment. Because they were starting with a limited budget, and because BU catered to such niche markets, the Rosens decided to start with very specific keywords that would require lower bids. They believed that starting this way would keep them from running out of money too soon.

Excerpt

UVA-M-0970

Jun. 20, 2019

Boots Unlimited: Getting a Foot in the Door (A)

Introduction

Ryan Rosen typed “sexy boots for men” into the Google search bar and sighed. He was working with his brother, Robert, to boost online sales at their family-owned boots shop, BootsUnlimited.com (BU) using a Google AdWords campaign. BU was not a retail shoe store where customers came in to try on shoes, buy the ones that fit best, and then left with their purchase. Instead, Ryan and Robert worked with a factory in Thailand to create one-of-a-kind boots using customized measurements. Other members of their family ran the factory, which helped the business in terms of communications and trust. See Figure 1 for an example of BU's boots.

Figure 1. Example of BU custom boots.

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Keywords: Resilience Education, family business, Google AdWords, market segmentation, search engine marketing