Corporate Blog-Aileen Music

June 06, 2010 3 Comments

By Leighton Tong

Nowadays there are so many B2B and B2C brokers to call us everyday. They try to sell their service to every potential client! It seems that your company doesn’t have this, you will be out! What is really meaning of B2B or B2C? What can we do in such new E-business environment? I reflected my studying which I have done 6 years before and copied part of it as following. I do like to share with people who really want to adopt E-business mechanism on his business strategy. Here is the first part.

Influences on Marketing Strategy

Although Porter (2001) claims that there is not a new economy but an old economy with access to a “new technology”, he still admits “Internet technology provides buyers with easier access to information about products and suppliers, thus bolstering buyer bargaining power.” In fact, Kotler(2003:40) concludes that “the advent of Internet has greatly increased the ability of companies to conduct their business faster, more accurately, over a wide range of time and space, at reduced cost, and with the ability to customize and personalize customer offerings.” For better understanding of this statement, in an alternative way, Chaston(2004) summarizes the developing route of modern marketing as being from mass marketing to one-to-one marketing. He explains, mass marketing relies on knowledge to understand and satisfy customer needs. This knowledge is a means “to be able to exploit the economies of scale associated with mass production to generate high absolute profits by selling large volume of low margin goods.”(Chaston, 2004:23) However, the IT evolution changed the situation. Chaston(2004) claims that in the Internet age mass marketing will be “given to the idea of product or service customization”, as “when customer began to log on to order goods they were asked to provide detailed information about themselves. It did not take long before new software systems began to read this information and offer the supplier an ability to make a customized response next time the customer came back.”(Chaston, 2004:41)

Actually, when discussing the influences of Internet technology on E-business, Kalakota et al. (1997) consolidated a range of different perspectives below:
 A communication perspective- the delivery of information, products/ services or payment by electronic means
 A business process perspective- the application of technology towards the automation of business transactions and workflows.
 A service perspective- enable cost cutting at the same time as increasing the speed and quality of service delivery.
 An online perspective – the buying and selling of products and information online.
All these should be regarded as basic marketing strategic viewpoints under the current E-business setting.

Furthermore, Chaffey et al.(2000) define the new term “Internet Marketing” or “E-marketing” as “the application of the Internet and related digital technologies to achieve marketing objectives”. And they point out that the outstanding issue should be to focus on new media marketing communication.(See Figure 3.6) This is confirmed by Sahay et al.(1998), who say “new interactive media (NIM) such as the Internet have the potential to transform the buying and selling of goods and services, with important strategic implications for all businesses.” Thus, “recognizing the differences between the Internet and other media is important to achieve success in channel promotion and channel satisfaction, and will lead in turn to positive channel outcomes and profitability.”(Chaffey, 2002)
Figure 3.6: Summary of Communication Models for a) Traditional Media b) New Media

Source: Chaffey (2002)

To sum up, although there are different influences from the Internet on the new classification of so-called “bit-based” and “atom-based” product markets (Sahay et al.,1998), basically business success still depends on the value recognized by the customer. So from the study handled by Sahay et al.(1998), the conclusion might be that in the E-business environment, providing quality customer service will finally determine the success of any new or old marketing strategy, this means that the customer-oriented approach is highlighted again in E-business.

Knowledge

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