Empowering customers through education-based videos in e-commerce

Digital marketing is a fascinating discipline. It is getting matured before our eyes and surprises us every day as it is expanding fast into various sub-disciplines. Video marketing is one of them. The objective of this paper is to examine the different marketing functions of video promotion with a special focus on the e-commerce environment. There, it traditionally served customer education, focusing exclusively on products and their features. However, the current practice demonstrates that marketing managers have quickly realized the potentials of content marketing in general, and education-based content specifically. As a result, they started to prepare video sessions designed to educate their customers in the whole context of their products and brands, not just explaining a product and its features. While processing the data of prominent e-shops from the Czech Republic and Austria, examples of video sales promotion and branding in the e-commerce environment have been analysed both from the viewpoint of their content focus and added value to customers. The comparative analysis proved a much higher interest in video promotion of the Czech e-retailer than in the case of the Austrian counterpart. Managerial implications and proposals for further research have been suggested.