ABSTRACT
In a short period of time, e-marketing has become a facet of marketing that cannot be ignored. With some enthusiastic adopters of digital technologies such as Cisco, easyJet and IBM now achieving the majority of their sales and customer service on-line, many organizations are examining how they can best make use of this new medium. However, the medium is perhaps best known for the spectacular ‘dotcom’ failures such as Boo.com, Peapod, Clickmango etc. Consequently, marketers need to carefully assess the significance of e-marketing and assimilate it, as appropriate, into all aspects of marketing from strategy and planning to marketing research, objectives setting, buyer behaviour, marketing communications and the marketing mix. The key phrase here is ‘as appropriate’. The impact of new technologies such as the Internet will vary greatly according to the existing product, market, channel structure and business model of each organization.
