Page 239 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 4

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how companies can use the principles of marketing strategy and the
four Ps of marketing to develop a marketing mix that achieves their goals for selling and pro-
moting their products and services online. Some companies use a product-based marketing
214 strategy and some use a customer-based strategy. The Web enables companies to mix these
strategies and give customers a choice about which approach they prefer. Many companies are
using storytelling techniques to establish consistent branding messages across all media (online
and offline) channels they use to connect with customers.
Market segmentation using geographic, demographic, and psychographic information can
work as well on the Web as it does in the physical world. The Web gives companies the power-
ful added ability to segment markets by customer behavior and life-cycle stage, even when the
same customer exhibits different behavior during different visits to the company’s site. These
additional segmentation capabilities can lead to one-to-one online marketing approaches that
result in greater relationship intensity than most non-online approaches. Companies have
developed a number of ways to categorize customers in these relationships and can design
marketing messages tailored to customer needs.
Online advertising has become more intrusive since it was introduced in the mid-1990s, even
though research has shown that users find such ads to be irritating. You learned how companies
are using various types of ads, including banners, pop-ups, pop-behinds, text, inline text, and inter-
stitials to sell products and services online. Permission marketing and opt-in e-mail offer alterna-
tives that can be used with or instead of Web page ads. Context-sensitive text ads are a rapidly
growing form of online advertising that users find less intrusive than other online advertising media.
Many companies are using the Web to manage their relationships with customers. By
understanding the nature of communication on the Web, companies can use it to identify and
reach the largest possible number of qualified customers. Technology-enabled customer rela-
tionship management can provide better returns for businesses on the Web than the traditional
unaided approaches of market segmentation and micromarketing.
Firms on the Web can use rational branding instead of the emotional branding techniques
that work well in mass media advertising. Some businesses on the Web are sharing and trans-
ferring brand benefits through affiliate marketing and cooperative efforts among brand owners.
Others are using viral marketing strategies in online social media to increase awareness of their
brands and the size of their customer bases.
Successful search engine positioning and domain name selection can be critical for many
businesses in their quests for new online customers. The most important theme in this chapter is
that companies must integrate the Web marketing tools they use into a cohesive and customer-
sensitive overall marketing strategy.

Key Terms

acquisition cost ad-blocking software
active ads affiliate marketing
ad view affiliate program broker

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