We have to advertise a little nowadays if only to keep on the right side of future trends with regards to Google, which is possibly why you are reading this right now. However such is the competition and such is the ferocity of that competition at the busiest times that our advertising budget is predominantly spent during the year rather than at Christmas. This is in spite of the majority of sales occuring in December, so why do we follow this rather unusual strategy?Well we’re only a little company. We can’t occupy the top advertising positions on a regular basis so we have to be selective and apart from anything else, we’re operating a Gift Basket service throughout the year. Christmas is important, but it is 2 months in the year. There are ten months in between and its during that time that we like to innovate, it’s a way of life for us and since money flows from work which is fun, then that’s our approach to business.We differentiate ourselves in terms of presentation, quality and value for money. We don’t want to spend more than a certain percentage of our annual turnover. We do not extrapolate our Christmas turnover and have a separate budget for this and that is what sets us apart from other advertisers.We only pop up at certain times at Christmas time simply because a sustained advertising campaign would result in the diminution in the value of our gift baskets as received by our customers.On our infographic, you will see that advertisers tend to be the Generalists in the hamper industry and at Christmas time, out come the department stores with their mega budgets. Smaller producers such as ourselves tend to adopt a very targeted approach because we cant follow a similar advertising strategy based on our budgets.The overall objective is to get from one November 11th to the next whilst breaking even. We don’t want to make money, although that would be nice. Any money we make is invested back into the business, but in truth we’re only interested in making enough money to sustain us. That’s why our advertising budget is constrained and why we don’t hold much faith in Return on Investment bidding systems.We believe we have better products and a better service than the companies which rely mostly on advertising. We hope you visit us and compare our designs with our competitors.This is the 2nd part in a nine part series positioning Basketsgalore within the competitive online market for gift baskets and hampers when looking at the industry from an international perspective.