The Internet as a Medium of Marketing Communication

MASTER'S THESIS

The Internet as a Medium of

Marketing Communication

YAN FENG

PO LI

Department of Business Administration and Social Science

Division of Industrial Marketing and e-commerce

Supervisor: Tim Foster

Date: 04-01-2005

1

Abstract

The Internet is changing the way businesses communicate with their markets. It gives the marketers new and unique opportunities in their communication. The advent of the Internet as added various new dimensions to the promotional management process. One dimension is that the Internet is a medium that combines the features of both broadcasting and publishing to facilitate two-way communication. In addition, Internet has an important role to play in stakeholder management process and to communicate with a wide range of stakeholder interests. The Web site represents an opportunity to analyze communication strategies. It is also the platform used to communicate with stakeholders. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the Internet is used as a medium for marketing communication and how classified stakeholders are targeted online. The data was gathered through interviews with two industries companies. The findings showed that the online communication tools such as online advertising and public relations are the most important tools. The ways to communicate with stakeholders on Internet are intranets, extranets, Website, E-mail and Chats. Web sites provide information, improve communication and help to build closer relationship with stakeholders. 2

Acknowledgements

The Internet is a very interesting topic. That is why we want to study and investigate about this area. Writing this thesis is a tough work. We read a lot of books and related journal. During this period, we get deeper knowledge about the area and want to learn more about it in the future.

This thesis is the result of very hard work and lots of fun too. We have been frustrated during our work, but we get the support and encouragement from many people. We would like to thank our supervisor, Tim Foster, for his unlimited devotion, advice and encouragement during our work. He gives us a tremendous help for finding theories and revises our thesis patiently.

We would also like to thank the interviewees at the companies investigated in our study, Lenovo and Huawei-3com, for devoting time to our interviews.

Finally, we would like to thank our families and friends for their support and encouragement. We would also like to thank all other master thesis authors we have consulted in our work, for their advice and help.

Luleå, January 2005

Yan Feng Po Li 3

Table of Contents

1 Introduction..........................................................................................................................................6

1.1 Background...............................................................................................................................6

1.2 Problem Discussion..................................................................................................................9

1.3 Overall Purpose and Research Questions.........................................................................12

1.4 Disposition of the Thesis........................................................................................................12

2 Literature Review..............................................................................................................................13

2.1 Online Marketing Communication Tools..............................................................................13

2.2 The classified stakeholders targeted online........................................................................24

3 Conceptualization and frame of reference.....................................................................................33

3.1 Conceptualization..................................................................................................................33

3.1.1 the conceptualization of RQ1: