Chapter Summary
E-business is the continuous optimization of a firm’s business activities through digital technology. E-commerce is the subset of e-business focused on transactions. E-marketing is the use of information technology in the processes of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers, and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. It is the application of information technology to traditional marketing practices.
The dynamic e-marketing environment poses competitive, economic, and other threats even as it offers opportunities to develop new products, new markets, new media, and new channels. Individual buyers have more power because of the television remote control, computer mouse, and the ability to compare products and pricing online, and the ability to upload content that affects bran images. Web 2.0 communities form online to discuss products, share files, and more, and this activity is out of marketer’s control. Most businesses in developed nations have adopted at least some information technologies, however, they continue to strive for effective and efficient IT use to entice and sell to buyers. The Internet deeply affects the citizens of many countries.
The Internet consists of computers with data, users who send and receive the data files, and a technology infrastructure to move, crate, and view or listen to the content. An intranet is a network that funs internally in a corporation using Internet standards. An extranet is an intranet to which value chain partners are admitted for strategic reasons. The Web is the part of the Internet that supports a graphical user interface for hypertext navigation with a browser. The Internet’s properties allow for more effective and efficient marketing in the Web 2.0 by shifting power from sellers to buyers; empowering search engines as reputation engines; increasing market and media fragmentation, and improving online and offline strategy integration (especially multichannel marketing). Content is still king online, but connections are critical in this climate and intellectual capital rules. Finally the long tail theory showed that the economy has changed from one of scarcity to one of abundance.
In the future, Web 3.0 will be a time of engagement, participation, and co-creation where consumer control, increased wireless networking, receiving-appliance convergence, merging of traditional and social media, refined engagement metrics, and the semantic Web will change the marketing landscape. It is essential for marketers to realize that television programs, radio shows, news, movies, books and photos are simply digital data sent by their creators in electronic form via satellite, telephone wires, or cable and then viewed by the audience on receiving appliances such as televisions, computers, radios, cell phones, PDAs, and other. This understanding opens the door for many new product opportunities that provide value to demanding customers of the future. Web 3.0 will be defined by better technology and Web applications, and possibly artificial intelligence.
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