Jamalon currently, the largest book e-tailer in the MENA province was launched in an attempt to bridge the gap between readers and books. The Amman-based e-tailer was founded in October 2010 by entrepreneur Ala' Alsallal with the support of Fadi Ghandour.

1. Running head: JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 1
Jamalon Marketing Plan
Qutaiba Alnoubani
Juode Al-Taher
Raya Hashem
Tala Salhah
Princess sumaya university for technology

2. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 2
Jamalon Marketing Plan
Introduction: -
Jamalon currently, the largest book e-tailer in the MENA province was launched in an
attempt to bridge the gap between readers and books. The Amman-based e-tailer was founded
on October 2010 by entrepreneur Ala' Alsallal with the support of Fadi Ghandour.
Jamalon built its brand’s image through the PODs it encapsulates, such as offering more than
10 million titles of Arabic and English books, home delivery, customized payment methods,
publish-on-demand services and over 30000 partnerships with Arabic and English publishers;
all designed to suit the Arab region’s needs.
Jamalon Management: -
Jamalon has grown from a small home business into the largest online bookstore in the
Middle East, offering more than 12 million Arabic & English books.
Jamalon strongly believes in teamwork and maintains strong relationships with publishers,
which positively affect its growth. And, adopts a democratic management style where
employees have a say in decision making.
Jamalon also promotes an open atmosphere through employing a diverse workforce,
incentive programs and weekly meetings to discuss ideas and concepts with employees.
Amongst the incentive programs mentioned above are insurance & social security for
employees, thus keeping them satisfied, loyal and maintaining low turnover rates.

3. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 3
Jamalon Customers: -
Jamalon sells its books to individual customers as well as businesses. It offers a wide variety
of books; thus, the purpose of purchase varies from one consumer to another.
When the company was first launched, its main aim was the Middle Eastern market, where
most consumers come from an Arabic speaking background and would like the chance to
read well known English books in their own language. Later, Jamalon expanded to include
North African countries by collaborating with Amazon. Although the expansion opened up
new horizons, the Middle East is still the biggest piece of the pie covering 85% of its market.

4. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 4
Situational Analysis for Jamalon: -
Environmental Factors:
 Economic Factors: The economy has been known to have a major impact on the
purchasing behavior of consumers. Jamalon being a book e-tailer company will surely
be affected by changes in the economy of the countries which it supplies. A country
whose economy is currently in the prosperity cycle will positively influence consumer
buying behavior, leading to a higher likelihood of purchases, & vice versa. Because
Jamalon operates in the MENA region where most countries are in economic
recession or depression; purchases are expected to be low. Therefore, Jamalon should
highlight the value they’re offering, in an attempt to counteract the economic factors.
 Social Factors: People in the MENA quarter are more inclined to spend their leisure
time watching movies or series, playing video games or going out with friends rather
than reading. Jamalon must integrate innovative methods, such as book-related
games, or a borrow-system, to assist in motivating people to order books.
 Technological Factors: Technology constantly booming comes with its own set of
challenges. People in the MENA vicinity remain skeptical of online purchasing,
preferring to buy their products from traditional brick & mortar stores. Jamalon has
incorporated the cash on delivery strategy to encourage consumers to make more
purchases, overcoming one of the biggest obstacles of the Middle Eastern consumers;
online payment.
 Political & Legal Factors: we have combined political & legal factors because they’re
intertwined in the Middle East. Since Jamalon is an online book e-tailer operating
within this region; it is at the risk of being subjected to both electronic-crime laws &
publication laws and political interference which could restrict or prohibit consumers
from purchasing certain books, & Jamalon from selling them.

5. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 5
 Competition: Due to globalization, competition has become fierce. Below is a table of
comparison between a major online e-tailer that’s a direct competitor of Jamalon;
Magrudy’s.
Jamalon Magrudy’s
Diversity of Products
 English/Arabic Books
 English/Arabic Books
 Stationary Supplies
 Toys & Games
 School Uniforms
 Educational School
Books (SATs +
IGCSE Syllabi)
Price/Book $ $$
Delivery Time 7-14 days 3-7 days
Payment Method - COD
Availability
✔ ✔
Additional Features  Reward Points
Program
 Weekly Deals
 Wishlist
 Free Return Policy
 Bulk Order Discounts
 Free Shipping on
orders above 100 AED

6. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 6
SWOT: -
 Strengths:
 Currently the largest book e-tailer in the Middle East.
 Offers “Cash on delivery” service.
 Uses a local interface which allows for the display of local currency.
 Low channel & inventory, costs as it has adopted the “dropship” method.
 Partnership with Aramex to assess in delivery.
 Offers authors a “Publish on Demand” service.
 Maintains partnerships with over 30,000 Arabic & English publishers.
 Loyalty scheme program through reward points.
 Weaknesses:
 Lack of proper marketing to help raise brand awareness & induce higher recognition
& recall rates.
 Lack of inventory control due to “Dropship” method. Increase in consumer
dissatisfaction when desired book is out of stock.
 Lack of innovation.
 Applies sales promotion strategy which is known to lead to customer disloyalty &
turnover.
 Opportunities:
 Introducing new revenue models, such as a subscription model.
 Introducing E-Books & Audiobooks to appeal to different prospects.

7. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 7
 Developing innovative incentives such as interactive books to encourage reading.
 Increasing customer engagement through creating a blog, microsites, or games like
book trivia.
 Threats:
 Existing competition from traditional retailers & global e-tailers.
 Legal & political restrictions.
 Economic situation.

8. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 8
Customer Description: -
Jamalon serves both B2C and B2B markets in the MENA vicinity, with 75% of book sales
attributed to readers aged between 18 – 34, & Saudi Arabia driving most of the traffic.
The potential B2C market includes anyone with internet access & an apt interest in reading,
located in the MENA region. However, the B2B market includes local & international
authors, various intermediaries and service providers that wish to interact with the MENA
audience.
Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning:-
With the rapid advancement in technology and change in consumer behavior, segmenting,
targeting & positioning has become more complex.
Jamalon adopts several segmentation variables to divide and determine its target market, the
most visible of those variables being geographic segmentation (MENA).
As for Jamalon’s targeting approach; a concentrated strategy is applied, as Jamalon only
offers English/Arabic books to those residing in the Middle East, with no apparent
differentiation in the marketing mix.
Lastly, Jamalon aims to maintain & further solidify its position as the largest book e-tailer in
the MENA province by adding value to consumers through affordable price, numerous
reading material and the COD service.

9. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 9
Marketing Plan: -
Market size and Growth Potential:
As a scalable business that has been founded in 2010, Jamalon’s market witnessed a
consistent growth trend over the span of its operation years, where its market is consisting of
(800,000) accounts and (297,564) visitors monthly the company is considered the biggest e-
tailer for books in the MENA region, the number of unique visitors is also rising as it is
estimated around (33,000) visitors monthly with (17,000-15,000) converters leading to an
estimated revenue of 2,000,000 dollars, this has been achieved through the team’s various
efforts in the b2b and b2c sectors in the various areas of the MENA region. Although the
company's market share include Saudi Arabia, morocco, Egypt, Uae and Algeria there is still
a promising future for growth for Jamalon in the area as the market has multiple other
countries that have not been touched yet like turkey and Qatar. Also, the people’s culture is
evolving from the old-fashioned way of thinking into a new millennial mindset affected by
technological advancement.
Strategic direction, targeting and positioning: -
Jamalon’s services is positioned as a personalized competitively priced book e-tailer in the
MENA area that tailors its offerings to a mass market. In comparison to other competitors
like Faylasof Jamalon ships internationally around the world, the companies also offer the
publish on demand service where they purplish any book you want based on your demand
thus providing customers with a wider range of titles to pick from. The experience that
Jamalon offers is tailored specifically to each customer
as they base their offerings and recommendations on the visitor’s previous interests in books
and author’s.

10. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 10
Marketing objectives
Marketing
Higher brand awareness and goodwill especially in untouched countries
Increase the number of direct sales
Run an effective Product awareness campaign to reshape and enhance the product's image
and influence in the customer's mind.
Media
Increase our share of voice by 50%
Increase the number of unique visitors
Promotion and advertising
Increase our share of the market by increasing awareness through a mobile ads campaign
Reach new target audiences like Turkish people using Yandex
Marketing mix
Product offering strategies:
Jamalon is a company that specializes in selling books in Arabic and English, and they offer a
service where they publish books on demand for upcoming authors.
We plan on expanding the offerings selection through several steps starting by increasing the
number of books from 12,000,000 books to 20,000,000 books, we will achieve this step by
introducing Turkish publishers offering to the MENA region in English, Arabic, Turkish
format, increasing the number of genres that Jamalon offers, and introducing the segment of
educational books like college and IGCSE.
We are also planning to do a partnership with MASMOO3 to introduce the option of audio
books to Jamalon’s website where some users prefer to listen to books rather than reading.
Our third idea revolves around introducing some titles as eBooks on our app where you can
use them on the go.

11. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 11
We will also work on expanding the user’s collection by adding in a subscription model to
Jamalon’s website where the user will get the choice to receive one of three books each
month for a total of 12 books per year from genres that he preselected and introduce the idea
of book rentals.
Promotion, Communication and Influence:
Jamalon’s promotion bundle only includes the discount method through the use of promo
codes.
We plan on expanding their offerings through offering the users a free eBook or audio book
when they first sign up to increase awareness about Jamalon’s new offerings.
Communication:
We will use Search engine marketing and Social media as our marketing vehicles
A. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Most of Jamalon’s traffic stems from search engines as it amounts to 44.13% of their total
traffic (31.35% is organic and 12.78% is paid search this is through the period of jan 2019 to
march 2019), so we need to improve the efficiency of organic search by focusing on search
engine optimization to 40% and decrease the percent of paid search to 6%.
We will be focusing on Google and Yandex as our main search engine as most of the Middle
East uses Google and 7.65% of Turkish users use Yandex
We are also planning on including a blog into our website that will include a brief
introduction about different books and reviews for these books to help us use an inbound
marketing strategy.

12. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 12
B. social media
We will be using social media as 10.58% from (Jan of 2019 to mar of 2019) of traffic is
generated through social media and we will look to increase the percentage of traffic from
social media to 16%, we will focus our ad campaign on mobile application ads more than
websites where our main platforms will be twitter then Facebook, and enhance Jamalon’s
presence on Instagram.
C. Additional promotional tools
Augmented reality billboards:
As augmented reality and Virtual reality is a big trend worldwide today, we want to use this
technology in our billboard's advertising campaign to introduce a new idea into the region
and attract a wider range of youth users who are interested in technology.
Microsites: We will build a micro site that will revolve around a trivia game campaign
price:
Jamalon’s pricing system aims to tailor its offerings in an affordable way that not cheap, their
pricing strategy is also set to match the competitors like Faylasof
Our new pricing system will offer more competitive prices as the new distribution method
which we are implementing will help us reduce cost allowing Jamalon to further reduce our
prices, also with products like e-books and audio books we don’t have any distribution costs
as it is an instant process online.
People:
Jamalon’s customer service sector has a big issue as they have high latency in responding to
customer issues.
We suggest that they enhance response time when dealing with customers through
implementing a live chat option on their website and the use of social media bots and
increasing the efficiency of their FAQ’s page.

13. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 13
Process:
We suggest that Jamalon make some changes to their UI and UX to reduce the bounce rate to
increase customer session time on the website leading to an increase in the potential of
acquiring a sale, then provide them with a seamless buying process which doesn’t take more
than 5 to 7 minutes.
Distribution:
As we are implementing the just in time system we are going to eliminate inventories and
warehouses so this will enable us to reduce cost as we will order the books and resell them
based on customer order so that they will receive the book from the publisher directly,
because of the large number of orders that is streamlined through Jamalon to the publishers
Jamalon’s will gain VIP status and might convince publishers to publish on demand for them
though this is for normal books as we prementioned eBooks and audio books won't need to
be distributed.

14. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 14
Implementation and control: -
strategy implantation detail
Marketing
mix
Marketing Content Communication Product Partnerships Finance Object
fulfille
Product
offering
Increase
the
number of
books to
20,000,000
books
Adding a
collection
of audio
books
Rent for
academic
books
And Audio
Books –
Ebooks
Introducing
a new
payment
method
(prepaid
card)
1.2
Promotion 3 Audio
Books and
EBooks
Samples
First month
sign up for
free
Advertising
on social
media
1.2.3.4
.5.6.7.8
.9

15. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 15
SEM and
SEO
People
Price Communicate
the price’s
competency with
the customers
pricing and
value earned
plus the one-
month free value
Differentiate
Subscription
prices
2
Distribution Create
strategic
partnerships
with delivery
companies
2
Place Website
improvement
9

16. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 16
time line
Implementation time table year 2020
Jan Feb March April May Jun July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Get recent books and expand library content and reach the goal of 20,000,000 and start free
trial membership campaign
Start the books rental
campaign around the start of
new semester
Start the books rental
campaign around the start of
new semester
Add the
prepaid
card
payment
method
Formulate the partnership with masmou3
service
Launch
the app
for
Jamalon
Start AR
add
campaign
SEO and SEM activities
Social media ads

17. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 17
-Evaluation:-
Evaluation is an important factor to measure the efficiency of our campaigns and
advertisements which of them had the biggest impact and return when it comes to sales and
brand awareness. To achieve this end, we will perform a pre and post evaluation to each of
the different aspects of our campaign which will indicate through our measurements which of
the campaigns were successful and to what extent. We will also test consumer perception of
the campaigns through questioners and surveys to measure to what extent we improved brand
image and awareness.

18. JAMALON MARKETING PLAN 18
References
De Leon, P. (2019). Arabic Book Retail Platform Jamalon Raises Over US$ 10 Million In Its
Ongoing Series B Round. Entrepreneur Middle East. Retrieved from
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/330306
Jamalon: Shaping the Arab Book Industry. How Jamalon is Shaping the Arab Book Industry.
The Navigator-Aramex. Retrieved from
http://navigator.aramex.com/Issues/2013/February2013/HowJamalonisShapingtheAra
bBookIndustry.aspx
Jamalon consolidates position as region’s largest online book retailer at the Sharjah
International Book Fair. (2016). Jamalon Consolidates Position as Region’s Largest
Online Book Retailer at the Sharjah International Book Fair. Jamalon Bookstore
Newsroom. Retrieved from https://jamalon.pr.co/141225-jamalon-consolidates-
position-as-region-s-largest-online-book-retailer-at-the-sharjah-international-book-fair
Atieh, N. (2018). Jamalon: Doing Things by the Book. Venture Magazine. Retrieved from
http://www.venturemagazine.me/2018/08/jamalon/
Jamalon. (2010). About Us. Jamalon. Retrieved from https://jamalon.com/en/
Magrudy’s. About Magrudy’s. Magrudy’s. Retrieved from https://magrudy.com/about-
magrudys/
Jamalon’s Competitors, Revenue, Number of Employees, Funding and Acquisition. (2019).
Owler. Retrieved from https://www.owler.com/company/jamalon
Performance of Jamalon. (2019). Performance.Jamalon. Easy Counter. Retrieved from
https://www.easycounter.com/report/performance.jamalon.com