Evaluacion de proyectos

Product Marketing On The Internet


Chandrasekar Subramaniam, Michael J. Shaw and David M. Gardner
Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
csubrama@uiuc.edu
Department of Business Administration, and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
m-shaw2@uiuc.eduDepartment of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
dmgardne@uiuc.edu




In this chapter, we discuss product marketing using the Internet, particularly the use of Internet for product promotion and new consumer processes. Internet advertising, virtual store-fronts, and virtual communities are explained with examples and our views. We thenpresent new consumer processes on the Internet and show how they enhance the fulfillment of the consumer purchase needs and also support interactive marketing. We discuss the challenges of measuring Web advertisements and close the chapter with a summary of our views on Internet and marketing.

(Product marketing; Product promotion; Web Advertisements; Virtual Communities; Increasing Returns;Consumer Processes; Interactive Marketing)




1. Introduction
Marketing, whether to consumers or to business, has a well defined purpose in most organizations. That purpose is to create exchanges that satisfy consumer and organizational goals (AMA, 1985). As marketing strategy is constructed to address a particular product/market, two tasks must be performed by elements of the marketingmix: the communications task and the operating task (Park et al., 1987).
The communication task can be thought of as "information" primarily conveyed through promotion, price, the product label and package. This information is used to position the product in the market and to inform and/or persuade present or potential customers. The operating task "is to remove barriers to transactions orexchanges so that customers who perceive the product as being capable of satisfying their needs and preferences can engage in a transaction with minimum effort" (Park et al., 1987). These barriers center around a) product accessibility, b) product availability, c) owning/using the product, d) correct perception and recall, and e) differential utility. The operating task has traditionally beenimplemented so that the transaction is enhanced by having the right product or service at the right place at the right time with the right service and the customer can take possession. A marketer, to execute these communication and operating tasks, uses one or more channels.
In this chapter, we examine the emergence of a new channel, the Internet, particularly its impact on consumer marketing andhow it affects some of the marketing tasks. We discuss two important aspects of consumer marketing that the Internet is capable of transforming; (1) the communication process, and (2) the consumer need fulfillment through new consumer processes. We start with explaining the marketing functions and the effect of Internet on these functions. In section 3, we discuss the Internet communication modeland advertising on the Internet. This is followed by a discussion on the use of virtual store-front and virtual communities as marketing channels. Section 6 introduces the new consumer processes on the Internet and the implications for marketing. We close the chapter by looking at the challenges of measuring the marketing efforts on the Internet.

2. The Marketing Functions and the InternetThe domain of marketing will, with rare exceptions, include at a minimum the following functions. These are the activities that need to take place to create exchanges that satisfy consumer and organizational goals. While there is no universal agreement on the exact designation of these activities, there is general agreement on the following as necessary (Churchill et al., 1995).
1. buying -...