Online vs. Traditional Marketing

Marketing encompasses a broad array of activities and strategies that deal with pricing, selling, and distributing a product (Wheelen & Hunger, 2000). Using a market development strategy, a business organization or business unit works to either capture a larger share of an existing market for current products through market saturation or penetration or to develop new markets for current products. Consumer product manufacturers and distributors have become expert at using advertising and promotion to achieve one or both of these goals (Wheelen & Hunger, 2000).

With the development of the World Wide Web or the Internet, new marketing venues have become available. Marketers in both the business-to-business (B2B) and the business-to-consumer (B2C) sectors are now using the Internet for online marketing. Online marketing may either supplant or augment traditional marketing modes, which include the use of other media and direct contact with potential or already identified customers (Pride & Ferrell, 1987).

Generally, marketing is defined as individual and organizational activities that facilitate and expedite satisfying exchange relationships in a dynamic environment through the creation, distribution, promotion, and pricing of goods, services, and ideas (Pride & Ferrell, 1987). The dynamic nature of the current "new economy" and the newly globalized marketplace has made available a number of alternative marketing environments, among which the Internet c

ologies, skyscraper ads that run down the right side of a page, pop-ups that automatically launch in a new browser window when a Web page is loaded, and transitional ads that appear in the main browser window between two Web pages. These ads were authorized by the Internet Advertising Bureau in February 2001 and have proliferated significantly, appealing to advertisers in virtually all sectors. A study carried out by Jupiter Research was described by Robinson (2002) and revealed that 69 percent of Internet users appear to dislike pop-up ads most of all. The new rich media ads that contain video, audio, and animation developed in Java HTML and Flash are apparently more appealing than other ad formats used on the Internet. Out of the 2 billion ads that one company, DoubleClick, serves daily, 20 percent are now rich media. A byproduct of the move toward rich media ads is a split in the advertising market. At the bottom end are the old-fashioned banner ads and at the top are sophisticated television type branding ads that are used by major advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Ford (Robinson, 2002). These new ads, in the view of Gotham (2002), are far more sophisticated than the old Internet advertising formats. Users' increas

Category: Business - O