| 3.2 Frame of Reference
The main purpose of this section is to provide an appropriate frame of reference for investigating internet marketing strategies among hotels in Ghana. According to Miles and Huberman, (1994) “A frame of reference explains either graphically or in narrative form the main things to be studied, the key factors, constructs or variables and the presumed relationships between them”. Also a frame of reference presents the theories and models that are most suitable for the research problem and it also describes how the theories are related to each other.
As indicated in chapter 2, the ICDT model is considered as a valuable and effective tool for measuring the degree of internet-fostering marketing transformation and its business value and effectiveness. Also the model considers the three internet capabilities (and incorporates internet transformational impact (Wen & Chen 2001; cited in Sigala, 2003).
Based on the ICDT model, Sigala (2003) postulated the extended internet marketing mix model which includes the traditional four Ps and Customer relation dimensions. Measuring internet marketing activities base on these five dimensions is argued to be an appropriate, effective and valuable tool that fully exploits the transformational capabilities of the internet (O’Connor, 1999; Sigala, Lockwood, & Jones, 2001; Liu & Arnett’s, 2000). For the purposes of analyzing the internet marketing strategies being adopted by hotels in Ghana, this research makes use of the extended internet marketing mix developed by sigala (2003).
As pointed out earlier in chapter two, the traditional internet mix (4Ps) corresponds to each virtual space of the ICDT model and the customer relation (C) is enabled by the emergence of new and sophisticated internet tools. The model also identified two areas of internet enabled marketing transformation: the type and the number of the internet marketing mix dimensions being transformed – indicating the type of business strategy being pursued by the organization and the level of sophistication of the transformed dimensions that exploit the internet’s customisation/aggregation capabilities – indicating the level of the exploitation of the internet’s capabilities. (Sigala, 2003)
This model has been chosen because it indicates how each of the five dimensions in the extended internet marketing mix is analyzed, depicting the degree to which hotels have adopted sophisticated internet marketing strategies.
To measure the degree to which hotels in Ghana have adopted sophisticated internet strategies, each of the five dimensions are analysed in several features as shown in table 3. This is in line with Angehrn’s , (1997) and Sigala, (2003) analysis of the internet marketing mix model, the features of each of the five dimensions are characterised as low or high sophistication depending on the extent to which the interactivity and connectivity capabilities of the internet are exploited by the hotels. In table 1.0, features under the heading low sophistication represents activities of low sophistication whereas features under the heading high sophistication represent activities of high sophistication.
To measure the transformation degrees of each of the five dimensions the ratio of the sum of all the aspects used to the total number of the aspects within the dimension is calculated with all the aspects having the same scale.
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