INMA_A01.QXD

All organisations operate within an environment that influences the way in which they

conduct business. Organisations that monitor, understand and respond appropriately to

changes in the environment have the greatest opportunities to compete effectively in the

competitive marketplace. Understanding an organisation’s environment is a key part of

situation analysisfor the Internet marketing strategy development process introduced in

Figure 1.9 and covered further in Chapter 4. There is also the need for a process to contin-

ually monitor the environment which is often referred to as environmental scanning.

In the next two chapters we look specifically at how organisations can assess and

understand changes to the digital environment they operate in. The need to ‘sense and

respond’ is particularly important for online marketers because of the rapid changes in

customer behaviour we introduced in the first chapter. Let’s look at two more examples

of rapidly changing behaviour. First, complete Activity 2.1 to see how online media sites

have increased in popularity over the past five years. An example of the changes is indi-

cated by Figure 2.1 which shows the increasing number of visitors to Handbag.com over

the last 10 years. Marketers at client organisations or their agencies who aren’t aware of

these changes in media consumption are missing an opportunity not only to advertise

to these audiences, but also to interact with them by engaging them in polls or quizzes

or games on microsites or destination sites, yet many of the marketers and their agencies

continue with the status quo.

CHAPTER 2· THE INTERNET MICRO-ENVIRONMENT

Situation analysis
Collection and review of
information about an
organisation’s external
environment and
internal processes and
resources in order to
inform its strategies.

Environmental
scanning and
analysis
The process of
continuously
monitoring the
environment and
events and responding
accordingly.

Figure 2.1 Increase in traffic volume at Handbag.com in selected months when audited.

Page impressions are pages served to visitors, visitor sessions are visits up to a

maximum of 30 minutes and unique visitors is the number of individuals visiting the

site in a given month

Source: Compiled from ABC Electronic (www.abce.org.uk)

Millions

Jul-

00

Nov-

00

May-

01

Oct-

01

May-

02

Sep-

02

Mar-

03

Sep-

03

Oct-

04

Jan-

05

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

Millions

Visitor sessions

(right axis)

Unique visitor

(right axis)

Page impessions

(left axis)

Introduction