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 ônew economyö and the newly globalized marketplace has made available a number of alternative marketing environments, among which the Internet certainly predominates.
For marketing professionals, the choice of marketing media has become vitally significant. Online marketing, as will be demonstrated herein, differs in several key ways from traditional marketing activities (Wheelen & Hunger, 2000). At issue in this research proposal is the question of whether online marketing should be understood as simply one more marketing strategy or approached as an alternative to traditional marketing activities.
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