Internet services – solutions for marketing
improvement
Assistant Nicoleta
Buzilă, PhD Candidate
Associate Professor
Silvia Medinschi, PhD
Lector Simona Cristina
Costea, PhD Candidate
TIBISCUS UNIVERSITY, TIMIŞOARA
Abstract
Internet
services are offering the ideal means for a company to establish certain
segments of target customers and for focusing their efforts within the
marketing field towards these segments.
The Internet
is a way to realize an interactive communication between the company and the client,
and represent an instrument for the customer orientation and education.
Key words: marketing,
Internet, marketspace
Introduction
The Internet, the net, the network of all networks or, more precisely, Internet services most definitely represent the field that has known the greatest development over the last ten years of all fields of the global economy. Even if its early days can be traced back in time to the mid 60s, the year 1990 was the beginning of an explosive diffusion of Internet services to a global extent.
The Internet is an extremely advantageous business environment characterized by speed, abolition of space and time barriers, interaction and flexibility. The Internet has presently become an efficient instrument for applying marketing strategies.
The Internet creates a universal customer and a common platform, it provides cheap access to a collection of documents and, in a relatively short period, it has been acknowledged to be the technology that will completely change the ways in which companies run their business and communicate with their users and customers. The Internet is still in an incipient development stage and there isn’t therefore an official standard system yet for measuring the efficiency of the activities developed within this framework.
The Internet offers the ideal setting for a company to establish certain target groups of customers and channel its marketing strategies toward these particular segments. The Internet is, at the same time, a means of an interactive company-client communication, and a useful instrument for the company to direct and instruct its clients. Interactivity, a specific feature of the Internet, makes it a unique instrument that helps companies implement a new type of marketing communication strategy, characterized by the opportunity to create a direct dialogue between the company and its potential customers.
The business success of a company using this new type of marketing communication strategy depends on the way in which it manages to implement the interactive communication system and the impact that this new on-line communication system will have on its potential customers. It is up to the promotion specialists of the company to find the most adequate ways of engaging in an on-line communication with potential customers, communication that must bring benefits to the visitors of the site, as well as to the company that owns it.
Internet services, from a marketing perspective or, more precisely, from a service marketing perspective, are considered to be a global product made up of four products: the communication channel, the equipment, the personnel involved in sales and service providing, and the customer.
Internet services can be grouped in two main categories:
·
Data transmission;
·
Web services.
The emergence and continuous development of such Internet services have brought along solutions related to a series of phenomena with a significant influence on the evolution of a company’s marketing activity, such as:
a)
phenomena related to mutations
within society’s life:
·
the exponential population growth
(the population of
·
the
constant modification of the structure of population on ages (the “aging” of
certain societies, such as the Japanese, Swedish, German ones etc. - “aging
societies”) and professions (the appearance of new ones, such as merchandiser,
network administrator, etc.);
·
the increase of the purchase power,
which leads to an expanding and diversification of people’s needs;
·
the
continuous transformation of the way of living (urbanization, motorization,
etc.);
b) phenomena related to
commercial technologies:
·
the appearance and development of
new methods of stock administration and provisioning;
·
the improvement of the systems of
transportation, mechanization, automatics and robotics;
·
the
increasing weight of market studies and motivational studies in making
marketing decisions etc.
A company that makes use of these Internet services is interested both in promoting a certain product or service, and in making a thoroughgoing marketing analysis based on the information acquired from the interactive communication with potential customers.
Thus, if we were to consider only one of the two Internet services, namely the web service, we could say that making a company website is a less expensive activity. At the same time, making and developing a website providing full interactivity of the communication system is a complex activity that supposes a high level of expenses made by the company in this purpose. This is determined by the fact that at present there is a great website competition, and the best solution in order to achieve the most relevant results for the company is an optimal graphic representation of the website, as well as different contents from the rest of the websites on the Internet.
A company’s marketing activity becomes more and more a so-called niche marketing activity and the traditional techniques, specific to the mass marketing become more and more inefficient.
Internet marketing, in continuous development, is considered by many specialists to be related to “event marketing”, characterized by the fact that potential customers are attracted by promoting a specific event, be it a contest with prizes or the opportunity to obtain certain goods or services for free.
Over the last years the specific electronic market has developed. On an electronic market we find, face to face, several offerors and several authorized solicitors who freely exchange goods and services, by means of an electronic pricing mechanism.
From an economic point of view, the electronic market is a relevant economic environment where the exchange relation between offerors and all real and potential customers takes place. The Internet provides for all users the opportunity to communicate rapidly, as well as quick and complete access to comprehensive information, creating a group of persons who live in a virtual space. In this space there are exchanges between individual participants, which couldn’t take place without the existence of the network. On the Internet there are offerors in competition with one another, which on classic markets, national or even international ones, based on their geographic position, wouldn’t have been in any kind of competition.
The business success of a company using this new type of marketing communication strategy depends on the way in which it manages to implement the interactive communication system and the impact that this new on-line communication system will have on its potential customers. It is up to the promotion specialists of the company to find the most adequate ways of engaging in an on-line communication with potential customers, communication that must bring benefits to the visitors of the site, as well as to the company that has created it.
Making use of the Internet’s huge potential within a company’s marketing and communication strategy requires a detailed planning, implementing and controlling activity, similar to the activities of any classic marketing or communication program.
With
the help of the Internet, businessmen have the opportunity to engage in a
“one-on-one” dialogue with their customers, continuously getting from them
demographic or psychographic information which is extremely important when
developing a marketing strategy.
Present marketing should take into consideration the strong impact of information and telecommunication technologies on global economy. During the first half of the 1990s, electronic commerce (e-commerce) was defined by the American corporation IBM as the most important component of electronic business (e-business); afterwards the domain of electronic business has embraced various other fields.
E-business is a relatively new term, which at the beginning of the year 2000 was based on the use of a very powerful IT infrastructure, such as the access to the Internet and other Wide Area Networks (WAN), software applications and communication services offered by the Internet service providers (ISP) and application service providers (ASP) in order to run a business efficiently. At the beginning of the 1990s the mobile commerce (m-business) appeared, having the same meaning as e-business, mentioning however that operations are made by means of a mobile phone or any other mobile device providing Internet access.
The software applications market for e-commerce and related activities is made up of businesses of common or reciprocal interest for buyers-suppliers at company level (B2B-Business to Business), and for customers, aiming at attracting and satisfying them by means of sales and services via Web (B2C-Business to Consumer). These components of the Internet industry rapidly enhance new ways of making profit (P2P-Path to Profit), by means of hardware/software technologies offered by the Internet.
Electronic commerce and marketing have determined significant mutations when it comes to the strategies adopted by companies nowadays. In this context we ought to mention the following features of companies activating in today’s extremely dynamic business environment:
·
companies
and organizations use an entire arsenal of complex Internet technologies in
order to achieve a most advantageous position on the market. They focus on high
speed communication of information;
·
visitor
relation management (VRM) is one of the greatest opportunities offered to
companies by the Web. One of the VRM technologies is Commerce Trends, which
helps creating a complex behavior analysis of the website visitors. For
instance, by correlating the information on the customers with demographic data,
certain companies have managed to significantly increase their turnover by
means of e-commerce websites.
Nevertheless, research shows that about half of the visitors that first reach an e-commerce website abandon it due to the fact that they are too difficult to surf.
The revolution produced by the information and communication technology has been an impulse for major changes in marketing practice. For instance, we may observe some notable effects on a company’s marketing activity, such as the ones of the fusions between telephone and computer, between telecommunications and teleprocessing. The informational explosion means a lot of reciprocal and interdependent relations between the expansion of science, its connection to new technologies, as well as the increasing creation of news, promotional information and ways of spending spare time, in the context of a more educated population (“knowledge means power”) in continuous expansion.
Results
Apart from the international traditional activities of big companies, the idea of a new marketing, specific to globalization, becomes more and more obvious. We are witnessing a new global economy and a global market in which distance is no longer an obstacle. Anyone, anywhere and anytime will have access to the global electronic network.
To sum up, the companies or the organizations use an entire arsenal of Internet technologies in order to achieve a most advantageous position on the market, responding to the constant development of the Web, determined by the continuous expansion and diversification of human needs. The new economy means being always functional, always connected, and the successful companies have learnt that lesson. That’s why we could state that today’s marketing is an offensive, even aggressive one, based on the company’s speed of reaction, on its promptness in answering the consumers’ requests.
The
globalization of worldwide economy, considering the informational context,
determines a radical change in marketing objectives; from an activity with a
high level of homogeneity and mass addressability, marketing will turn into an
activity characterized by a high level of heterogeneity, of fragmentation,
aimed at precisely determined target groups.
Sources:
1.
Roşca,
Cristina Bucur, O. Paiu,
Carmen Timofte, Mirela Vişan – Comerţul
electronic – Concepte, tehnologii
şi aplicaţii,
Ed. Economică, 2004, Bucureşti;
2.
Cristina
Mihaela Bucur – Comerţ electronic , Ed. A.S.E., 2002, Bucureşti;
3.
T. Popa – Marketing electronic, Ed. Universitatea
din
4.
*** Revista Marketing – Management, nr. 4/ 2002;
5.
***Tribuna economică
– nr 2/2007.