Electronic Markets on Internet marketing

Abstract

Dear readers of Electronic Markets, It has been 5 years since ElectronicMarkets published the first special issue on Internet marketing. In the preface to this section, the guest editor Christopher P. Holland noted that “The changing pattern of communication between and among customers and suppliers will [...] affect all of the marketing stages of adoption from customer awareness, attitude, lead generation and validation through to the trial of products, sales and customer retention” (Holland 2008). This was at a time when the evolution of the Web 2.0 or Social Media technologies was still in their early stages. Internet marketing mainly referred to broadcasting information via websites and electronic mailings, advertising on search and marketplace sites as well as the evaluation of customer activity and communication of customer feedback. Today, the statement is still valid and we find that the convergence of many technologies has enhanced the potentials of Internet marketing towards more real-time capabilities. The technological “enablers” are mobile and social technologies that link the points where information is created and where information is used. Mobile technologies from auto identification and positioning (e.g. NFC, RFID, GPS) to smartphones and tablet computers are equipped with individual Internet addresses and generate information whenever the status of objects or user input is changed. This includes information on changes of location, preferences and needs which may be collected automatically in an unprecedented volume. Increasingly, not only structured information, such as events in a logistics chain or likes in the social web, is available, but also unstructured information, such as opinions and feedback. Together with real-time business intelligence and in-memory systems this yields a glimpse at the future opportunities of Internet marketing where information is not only collected and analyzed, but used to enrich – also in realtime – communication with customers and other contacts. Clearly, information technology has increased the opportunities for businesses to learn from market development, the usage of products as well as customer feedback and to leverage this knowledge for product development and more immediate as well as direct customer interaction. For Electronic Markets this is an exciting field since understanding the future mechanisms of Internet marketing calls for research that links a broad range of topics from technological, marketing and business to legal issues (see also Ngai 2003). We believe that electronic markets as information systems “in the cloud”, which enable n:m networking among market participants, will become more critical in this context. This applies to the technological integration of various devices across multiple actors, the placement and pricing of advertisements as well as collecting market intelligence and the governance of data usage in line with legal constraints (see also Alt and Klein 2011). The special section on “Internet Marketing” in this issue may be conceived as a contribution to foster the understanding of marketing in electronic media. It first includes a comprehensive overview of research in this field since 1994 which may serve as a compelling reference to support and guide future research. Among the identified Internet marketing topics are future search strategies which not only refer to an earlier article published in Electronic Markets (Gauzente 2009), but also to a second article in this special issue which analyzes how product searches are influenced by brand names and recommendations of other users. Finally, a third paper reports on the effectiveness of electronic couponing for digital R. Alt (*) University of Leipzig, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: rainer.alt@uni-leipzig.de