What is e-marketing?

Internet marketing has been described simply as ‘achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies’ (Chaffey et al., 2009). This succinct definition helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that should determine investment in Internet marketing, not the adoption of the technology! These digital technologies include Internet media such as web sites and e-mail as well as other digital media such as wireless or mobile and media for delivering digital television such as cable and satellite.

1. Marketing defined

As with many terms with the ‘e’ prefix, we need to return to an original definition of the topic to more fully understand what e-marketing involves. The definition of marketing by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing is:

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satis­fying customer requirements profitably.

This definition emphasizes the focus of marketing on the customer, while at the same time implying a need to link to other business operations to achieve this profitability. In this chapter, and in Chapter 9, we will focus on how the Internet can be used to achieve the processes implied by this statement:

• Identifying – how can the Internet be used for marketing research to find out customers’ needs and wants?
• Anticipating -we have seen in Chapter 5 that anticipating the demand for digital services (the online revenue contribution) is key to governing the resource allocation to e-business.
• Satisfying – a key issue for e-marketing is how to achieve customer satisfaction through the electronic channel; this raises issues such as: is the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are physical products dispatched?

According to Chaffey et al. (2009) the term ‘marketing’ tends to be used in two distinct respects in modern management practice. It can describe:

1. The range of specialist marketing functions carried out within many organizations. Such functions include market research, brand and product management, public relations and customer service.
2. An approach or concept (the marketing concept) that can be used as the guiding philos­ophy for all functions and activities of an organization. Such a philosophy encompasses all aspects of a business. Business strategy is guided by an organization’s market and competitor focus and everyone in the organization should be required to have a customer focus in their job.

The modern marketing concept (Houston, 1986) unites these two meanings and stresses that marketing encompasses the range of organizational functions and processes that seek to determine the needs of target markets and deliver products and services to customers and other key stakeholders such as employees and financial institutions. Valentin (1996) argues that the marketing concept should lie at the heart of the organization, and the actions of directors, managers and employees should be guided by its philosophy.

The modern concept of marketing is much broader than the lay person’s view of mar­keting simply as advertising and sales. Modern marketing philosophy also requires that organizations be committed to a marketing or customer orientation (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993). This concept involves all parts of the organization coordinating activities to ensure that customer needs are met efficiently, effectively and profitably. The development of e-commerce services in response to changes in market needs is one example of market orientation, as Hughes (2001) has pointed out. In his study of new Internet start-ups and traditional banking operations which use e-commerce, he found that the Internet or e-business start-ups were more involved in conducting research to understand the cus­tomer experience and then adapting the service accordingly.

2. E-marketing defined

The term ‘Internet marketing’ tends to refer to an external perspective of how the Internet can be used in conjunction with traditional media to acquire and deliver services to cus­tomers. An alternative term is ‘e-marketing’ (for example, McDonald and Wilson, 1999) which can be considered to have a broader scope since it refers to any use of technology to achieve marketing objectives and has an external and an internal perspective. This is more consistent with the concept of e-business which involves managing both internal and external communications.

Digital marketing is another similar term, explained in Chapter 1, which is used by online marketing agencies and trade publications.

3. Distinguishing between e-marketing, e-business and e-commerce

Given that the marketing concept implies a broad meaning for marketing, how can we distin­guish between e-business and e-marketing? We can use a similar device to that of Figure 1.3 to help distinguish between them. The options are:

• Electronic business has some degree of overlap with electronic marketing. From the discussion of the marketing concept above we can reject this since both e-business and e-marketing are broad topics.
• Electronic business is broadly equivalent to electronic marketing. This is perhaps more realistic, and indeed some marketers would consider e-business and e-marketing to be synonymous.
• Electronic marketing is a subset of electronic business. It can be argued that this is most realistic since e-marketing is essentially customer-oriented and it has less emphasis on supply chain and procurement activities in comparison with e-business.

Referring back to Figure 1.3 once more, you may ask what, if e-commerce is best considered as a subset of e-business and e-marketing is also a subset of e-business, is the relationship between e-commerce and e-marketing? The implication is that they are similar, but e-com­merce is perhaps broader than e-marketing since it involves both buy-side and sell-side transactions, whereas e-marketing concentrates on sell-side transactions and communications.

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).