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Chapter 2 E-commerce fundamentals 59

tify these anomalies. Finally, he makes the point of the need to act rapidly to have scalability to ‘swarm the gap
in the defences of the enemy’ where there is a strong opportunity.
In an e-business context, we can see that strategic agility requires these characteristics and requirements
for an organization to be successful in its strategy development:
1. Efficient collection, dissemination and evaluation of different information sources from the micro- and
macro-environment.
2. Effective process for generating and reviewing the relevance of new strategies based on creating new
value for customers.
3. Efficient research into potential customer value against the business value generated.
4. Efficient implementation of prototypes of new functionality to deliver customer value.
5. Efficient measurement and review of results from prototypes to revise further to improve proposition or
to end trial.

Now complete Activity 2.1 to review the importance of these environmental influences.

Activity 2.1 Why are environmental influences important?

Purpose
To emphasize the importance of monitoring and acting on a range of environmental
influences.
Activity
For each of the environmental influences shown in Figure 2.1, give examples of why it
is important to monitor and respond in an e-business context.
Answers to activities can be found at www.pearsoned.co.uk/chaffey

Online marketplace analysis

Analysis of the online marketplace or ‘marketspace’ is a key part of developing a long-term
e-business plan or creating a shorter-term digital marketing campaign. Completing a mar-
ketplace analysis helps to define the main types of online presence that are part of a ‘click
ecosystem’ which describes the consumer behaviour (Chapter 9) or flow of online visitors
between search engines, media sites and other intermediaries to an organization and its
competitors. Prospects and customers in an online marketplace will naturally turn to search
engines to find products, services, brands and entertainment. Search engines act as a distri-
bution system which connects searchers to different intermediary sites for different phrases,
so the flow of visits between sites must be understood by the marketer in their sector.
To help understand and summarize the online linkages between online businesses and
traffic flows it is worthwhile to produce an online marketplace map as shown in Figure 2.3.
This shows the relative importance of different online intermediaries in the marketplace and
the flow of clicks between your different customer segments, your company site(s) and dif-
ferent competitors via the intermediaries.