Promise and Challenges of Online Marketing

According to its most ardent apostles, online marketing will ring profound changes to various section of the economy. Consumers’ ability to order direct will seriously hurt different groups, particularly travel agents, stock brokers, insurance sales people, car dealers etc. These middlemen will be disinterring mediated by online services. At the same time some time, some re-inter mediation will take place in the form of some new online intermediaries who help consumers shop easily and obtain lower prices.
(Torres 2007 294-318) Certain websites act as an intelligent shopping agent for consumers looking for the best buys in several categories including books, toys, computers and electronics. Online marketing is also changing the world of commerce. The online marketers can reach ? global market. The internet marketing leads to the more rapid internationalization of small to medium size enterprises. The advantages of scale economics will be reduced, global advertising costs will be less and small enterprises offering specialized products will be able to reach ? much larger world market.
At the same time, ardent web commentators site ? number of challenges that online marketers face. (Wearne 2005 151-62) 7. 2 Limited Consumer Exposure Web users are doing more surfing than buying only an estimated 18% of surfers actually use the web regularly for sopping or to obtain commercial services such as travel information. The major online buyers today are businesses rather than individual customers. Online users are more upscale and technically oriented that the general population, making them ideal for computers, electronics and financial services but less for the mainstream products.

The internet offers millions of websites and ? staggering volume of information. Navigating the web can be frustrating. Many sites go unnoticed and even visited sites must capture visitors’ attention or lose them to another site. Consumers are worried that unscrupulous interlopers will intercept their credit card numbers. Companies worry others will invade their computer systems for espionage or sabotage purposes. The internet is becoming more secure, but there is ? continuous race between the pace of new security measures and new code breaking measures.
(Lumsdon 2006 139-56) Consumers worry about privacy: companies might make unauthorized use of their names and other information such as selling it to others. There are also the ethical concerns that the internet helps upscale consumers shop more efficiently while leaving poorer consumers who have less access to the internet to pay higher prices. Just as the web has shifted power to consumers by giving them more product information than ever before, it has given them ? more potent, effective means of expressing disgruntlement or even outrage.
“The Internet, like the Gold Rush of 19th century has attracted many people who believe they can make money just like that. While people in the 19th century died in the cold, today’s explorers of the internet only lose their money. The Internet has revolutionized our way of working but not how business is run. (Mill 2005 117-28) The Information Revolution brought forth by the Internet seems very exciting and new. If we compare the Industrial Revolution of the early 1820s with the Information Revolution of today, we find some very striking similarities.
It was pretty late after the first steam engine was made that the steam engines began to be used in an industrial environment. The out put, at that time was cotton but today it is information. In both cases much time was consumed till the product matured into commodity. Steam engine then was to Industrial Revolution what the computer is to information technology now. At that time of industrial revolution very few people knew the working of steam engine just as when computer emerged only ? handful of people could only use the technology.
But the consistent use of information technology over the years has really turned it into commodity. If one looks at the economic value during the initial years the new technology emerged, one will invariably find the value overestimated. (Gladstone 2007 23) The real money can only be made once the technology is pushed into the industrialization phase. Only then is the market vast enough to accommodate low prices and high quality. After the internet has turned into indispensable commodity, the next thing worth considering is its access and transparency.
It was AOL who first used propriety software to provide access to their network and thenceforward access to Internet”. Through the use of modern technologies it is now possible switch ISPs without losing its continued functionality, which in turn meant industrialization of Internet Access phenomenon. Consequently the market consolidated and very few marketing players were considered competitive. (Martin 2004 22-28) The margins got lower as the industrialization of Internet Access Services progressed.
As ? result of this consolidation of markets, many companies now are tried to stabilize their business through the adoption of standards in technology and processes. But doing ? profitable business is an aspect worth the review. Although companies like Yahoo and eBay have rocketed from zero to ? billion dollar business, they are yet seen lacking the ability to provide ? profitable business. But as the companies grow, the investors hope that at some point they will make ? profit. Companies now focus on their core competencies without having to worry about integration.
E-Services is expected to be the one to be counted for major growth areas on the Internet in the days to come because in the final analysis it will be E-Service which will generate more money than all current e-business services put together can do. The future of the companies having commodity technologies appears optimistic and one can foresee these companies making ? lot of money in the future save ? lot of costs and become more successful in their present phase of progress and development. The period of time required to commoditize ? product can be decades ahead.
The speeding up of this process for future benefits is already underway, but it is most unlikely that commodities would come out of labs and brought into use within ? couple of months or years. Therefore the clarity and understanding of Internet becoming ? commodity in short p of time is highly essential. (Schneider 2005 59-68) 7. 3 Business Attractions “The knack of communicating or exchanging information instantly and across vast distances has enabled in numerous individuals and more business houses to participate in the economy, regardless of their location.
Big business houses can hire educated workers regardless of where they are from, greatly expanding employment opportunities for people the world over, and giving the developing nations the ability to become economic powerhouses by providing information technology services to the rest of the world. The Internet, along with other computer technologies, is literally enabling some developing countries to take big strides in the industrial revolution and jump straight to the Internet Age.
The Internet is gradually breaking down logistical barriers of businesses. It is also offering greater flexibility and power in doing business in their way. ? multinational corporation can now be as swift and agile as one yet in infancy. Now ? family business firm located in ? remote rural village can have the world in its arms, so also can capture ? marketplace of its own. (Mill 2005 117-28) The Internet gives its consumers the opportunity to shop smarter, to find the best products at the right prices.
In fact, the internet empowers them in so many ways that were once available to large companies only, enabling them to join with others; to bid competitively and buy products around the world. Anything which any one is going to start has some of the objectives and goal which they want to be full fill in the given limit of time or some times with in ? very short times. There are also some of the objectives of the organizations for the provision of products and their marketing in big markets these objectives are based on the overall strategy or planning of the whole procedure of marketing. (Goetzl 2007 1-78) These are:
• Setting up of goals and targets those targets which the organization wants to achieve in the given short period of time for profit making and success in the future for these reason they made the decision making and many other strategies to meet these goals. • The setting up of targets by dividing them in to the short term and the long term, there are some of the targets which can be completed with in he short period of tine however some times there are many targets that takes much more time to completion these targets achievements can be done by the organization by setting of these targets with the time settings.
• Setting up of the objectives is necessary and they must be in understand form, it is also the most commonly used activity that when ever some organization are planning to introduce some new products in the market they make some of the medias for transmitting that information to the individuals in that organizations and every one should be assigned their objectives for the completion of objectives in the short period of time.
• Performance evaluation is necessary for the marketing process and it is necessary that these performance evaluations should be on regular basis, some organizations have the good monitoring system to know what is going in to the markets and they know the changes in trends in markets to make changes in their production too. • These objectives and targets enable the organization to make ? good control over the marketing activities and play the good role in the future marketing of the products.
• Motivation is also one of those tools which are very important to the organizations during marketing, • It is necessary that the work should be done for meeting the common goals and objectives necessary for marketing of the products. It is necessary for the organization to meet the good marketing system to establish the objectives and target marketing system that will helping the further progress in the product marketing and will be helpful for covering most of the sections of the markers. (Wearne 2005 151-62)