FULL NAME: HE XINQI
CLASS NUMBER: L42
PERSONAL EMAIL: HXQ0624@gmail.com
Question: Discuss how ICTs
(information and communication technologies) have changed the nature of
marketing activities. Explain what are the new challenges faced in marketing in
the digital economy. Justify your argument theoretically.
The information and communication technologies through the
e-market to change the nature of marketing value. Marketing is the process of
communicating, which is means that traditionally via personal selling,
billboard, advertisement, TV clips, exhibition and S-mail. Nowadays, we are
using both traditional and new online Medias. And ICT also convincing the
positive values of a product or a service to target customers, the positive
value is means that a product has a good quality and acceptable price, and
there have a place, like retailers, to get it. And there have some
effectiveness factors to influence e-Media, such as interactivity,
Intelligence, Individualism, Integration, Industry restructuring, Independence
of location. The interactive is a key
characteristic of the internet. Instead of a company simply pushing a message
to a customer, and customers can now interact with companies online by seeking
out information themselves, this is a distinction between traditional and new
e-Media. Intelligence is the internet and other new media facilities new ways
of collecting data on customer preferences and perceptions. No longer do companies have to rely on traditional
surveys for their market research, as new media offer new ways to understand
market segments in much greater detail. Individualization is to provide
customers a greater personalization and customization service. And following by
this is integration, the internet enables the integration of various marketing
communication techniques in at least two ways. It complements other marketing
channels for product promotion and it facilities customer service. The industry
restructuring is forcing marketers to consider how to represent the company’s brand
and products among the various intermediaries, such as publish news on internet
or TV. And the last one is independence of location, new media increase the
reach of companies and their communications, and so companies need to manage
their relationships with various local agents are affected by the globalization
of marketing efforts, or their can have the first hand new from customers, so
that they can based on these feedback or news to improve their services and
quality of products.
The traditional way for companies is need to print lots of
advertisement on papers, and they do need numbers of people to help them publicity their products. Now, they can
through internet to sell their products to customers directly, and this new
media help companies to save a lot of transaction cost for intermediaries than
use the traditional ways to sell products.
The new e-Media can help a company to have an effectiveness
in profiling their market and help a company to make a decision of this market,
so after they make a decision, they can to consider about their brand. Branding
is the process of creating and evolving successful brands. Brands should be
built around customer segments, not vice versa and brands should be as narrow
as possible but still economically feasible. Planning brand extensions on
customer needs, not component similar as other products. Companies should
facilitate the switching by customers to other brands within the same company.
If something catastrophic to the brand, the leader of this company should drop
this brand and re-brand their products. Furthermore, a leader of company should
consider how the company measures brand equity, because the value of a brand
varies dramatically from customer to customer, and the ICT may have an important
role to play with a company. A company can base on the internet to build a
customer life cycle, and using four Ps, which are place, product, promotion and
price to attract customers, so it will form
a system which is called customer relationship management.
There have some new challenges faced in marketing in the
digital economics, such as viral marketing and profiling. The negative effects
of viral marketing is that as with most aspects of marketing, there is a
downside to viral marketing as well. For one, it has proved difficult to create
successful viral concepts. And someone think this is merely a fad. Also, there
is a risk that the brand may be damaged if unsolicited messages run amuck, such
as “Three Wolf Moon T-shirt”. Viral marketing is issue of spam, because it is
difficult to forecast or measure effectiveness, low entry barrier for all, and
viral bad publicity cannot be stopped.
What is more, there is a high cost of integration on OmniChannel
retailing, because customers not merely online or offline, so a company needs
to cross of online or traditional channels to please demanding customers. To
integration of physical retails with e-Media, e-Channel and internet of things
need company to spend lots of cost on these things.
In short, e-Media marketing has been changing the world, but
company should base on their own situation and to make a right decision to
change to suit with the new e-Media marketing.