Page 186 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

Seller
Sends a few carefully
Mass media crafted messages to all
One-to-many 161
Thousands or millions of
viewers, listeners, or readers

Seller
The Web
Many-to-one
and
many-to-many

Information-seeking
Web site visitors
Learning
Cengage
Personal contact Salesperson Customer or prospect
One-to-one 2015
©
FIGURE 3-9 Business communication modes
To help you better understand the differences shown in Figure 3-9, read the following
scenario. The scenario assumes that you have heard about a new book, but would like to
learn more about it before buying it. Consider how your information acquisition process
would vary, depending on the medium you used to gather the information.
• Mass media: You might have been exposed to general promotional messages
from book publishers that have created impressions about quality associated
with particular book brands. If your existing knowledge includes a brand
identity for the book’s publisher, these messages might influence your per-
ceptions of the book. You might have been exposed to an ad for the title on
television, radio, or in print. You might have heard the book’s author inter-
viewed on a radio program or read a review of the book in a publication such
as The New York Times Book Review or Booklist magazine. Notice that most
of these process elements involve you as a passive recipient of information.
This communication channel is labeled “Mass media” and appears at the top
of Figure 3-9. Communication in this model flows from one advertiser to
many potential buyers and thus is called a one-to-many communication
model. The defining characteristic of the mass media promotion process is
that the seller is active and the buyer is passive.
• Personal contact: Small-value items are not frequently sold through this
medium because the costs of devoting a salesperson’s efforts to a small sale are
prohibitive. However, in the case of books, local bookshop owners and employ-
ees often devote considerable time and resources to developing close relation-
ships with their customers. Although each individual book sale is a small-value
Copyright 2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.