Marketing in the Information Age

Marketing In the Information Age

Introduction

Imagine that you have received an advertisement in the mail offering your favorite type of running shoes at a seventy percent savings as long as you provide the offer number at the time of purchase and purchase the shoes within the next six months. How'd you know I've been a fairly serious runner for almost 30 years? At the time you don't need new shoes, but four months later you have a blow out on your right shoe just days before your first Boston Marathon. Since you're are in a new town and have no idea where to get your shoes, you look up your favorite running store online and order your shoes from the store using your offer number. Ten years ago, this would have been impossible, but with the information age developments in the business world, today it's not. This paper will examine two areas that it has affected, direct marketing and e-commerce. The first section of this paper will examine what direct marketing and e-commerce are, next it will look at a brief history of direct marketing and e-commerce, then scrutinize the relevancy of direct marketing and e-commerce, next it will ponder some of the strengths and weaknesses of direct marketing and e-commerce, and then it will look at some of the current trends of direct marketing and e-commerce. The next section of the paper will review several articles relating to direct marketing and e-commerce. Let's begin with and overview of direct marketing and e-commerce. OK

Overview

Wikipedia defines direct marketing as a discipline within marketing that involves recording, analyzing, and tracking of customer's transactions to develop and prolong a profitable customer relationship. Companies that implement direct marketing techniques advertise directly to the consumer through media such as mail and email (Direct marketing, 2006). Direct marketing is the simplest means of getting your message out to large numbers of prospective customers while limiting the cost associated with marketing. Now let's look at a quick overview of electronic-commerce (e-commerce). OK

E-commerce can be defined as the selling, marketing and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as computer networks or the Internet (Electronic commerce, 2006). Yes E-commerce is prevalent in all modern industrialized countries, but has limited if any exposure in the third world countries of the world. Now that we have a basic understanding of direct marketing and e-commerce, next we will examine the history of each.

History of Direct Marketing and E-Commerce

History of direct marketing. Some people could argue that direct marketing began during the earliest markets with the merchants notifying loyal customers of new merchandise that had arrived, although this has some validity, the true sense of direct marketing probably came into play in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. These were the time periods of industrialization and when the postal system made great improvements allowing the mailing of advertisements to the customers. Mail continued to be the main source of direct marketing well into the late seventies, early eighties. The next large jump in direct marketing came about with the advent of telemarketing centers; these centers allowed businesses to reach targeted customers in minimum time and provided the companies with immediate feedback. The last big advancement in direct marketing has come from the information technology boom over the last twenty years, with the growth of the internet and email companies are able to send out mass emails to targeted individuals at little to no cost. Next we will examine the history of e-commerce. OK

History of e-commerce. The history of e-commerce is a relatively recent one that began in the late seventies with businesses exchanging products such as purchase orders electronically. The next evolution of e-commerce came in the mid nineties when the internet became common place with the general public. Companies saw the use of the web as the new way to do business, but the struggles to develop safe and secure means to make transactions took several years to catch up. E-commerce suffered a small setback during the dot-com collapse in the early twenty-first century, but major corporations saw the value of using the web to sell their products (Electronic commerce, 2006). E-commerce is now a thriving sector of the today's marketplace and continues to evolve, allowing today's consumers to purchase everything from food products to vehicles through the internet. This type of business has unlimited potential and will eventually be the way the majority of the world's commerce is handled. Let's now look