Page 203 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 4

COMMUNICATING WITH DIFFERENT
MARKET SEGMENTS

Identifying groups of potential customers is just the first step in selling to those customers.
An equally important component of any marketing strategy is the selection of
178 communication media to carry the marketing message.
Media selection, or choosing where to market and advertise a company, can be critical for
an online-only firm because it does not have a physical presence. The only contact a potential
customer might have with an online firm could be the image it projects through the media and
through its Web site. The challenge for online businesses, especially new online businesses, is
to convince customers to trust them even though they do not have a physical presence.

Trust, Complexity, and Media Choice
As you learned in Chapter 3 (see Figure 3-9), the Web provides a communication mode
that is an intermediate step between mass media and personal contact, but it is a very
broad step. Using the Web to communicate with potential customers offers many of the
advantages of personal contact selling and many of the cost savings of mass media.
Figure 4-2 shows how these three information dissemination modes compare on the
important dimensions of trust and product (or service) complexity.

Low Product or Service Complexity High

Learning
Mass media The Web Personal contact
Cengage

Low Trust High
2015
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FIGURE 4-2 Trust in three communication modes

Although mass media offers the lowest level of trust, many companies continue to use
it successfully. The cost of mass media advertising can be spread over the many people in
its large audiences. For example, the cost of creating and running a television ad can be
millions of dollars, but that ad will be viewed by millions of people. Thus, the cost of
advertising per viewer is very low. Its low cost per viewer makes mass media advertising
attractive to many companies.

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