CHAPTER 25
E-marketing
DAVE CHAFFEY
Introduction
In a short period of time, e-marketing has
become a facet of marketing that cannot be
ignored. With some enthusiastic adopters of
digital technologies such as Cisco, easyJet and
IBM now achieving the majority of their sales
and customer service on-line, many organiza-
tions are examining how they can best make
use of this new medium. However, the medium
is perhaps best known for the spectacular ‘dot-
com’ failures such as Boo.com, Peapod, Click-
mango etc. Consequently, marketers need to
carefully assess the significance of e-marketing
and assimilate it, as appropriate, into all aspects
of marketing from strategy and planning to
marketing research, objectives setting, buyer
behaviour, marketing communications and the
marketing mix. The key phrase here is ‘as
appropriate’. The impact of new technologies
such as the Internet will vary greatly according
to the existing product, market, channel struc-
ture and business model of each organization.
This chapter outlines an approach to
e-marketing planning, which can be applied to
all organizations. The approach is based on
careful assessment of the opportunities and
threats, clearly defined objectives and strategies,
and selection of appropriate e-marketing tactical
tools and resources to achieve these strategies.What is e-marketing?
There are now many terms with the e-prefix,
and many different interpretations. Within any
organization, developing a common under-
standing for terms such as e-commerce,
e-business and e-marketing, and how they
interrelate, is important to enable development
of a consistent, coherent strategy. We will now
briefly review these terms and how they
relate.
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is often
thought to simply refer to buying and selling
using the Internet; people immediately think of
consumer retail purchases from companies
such as Amazon. But e-commerce involves
much more than electronically mediated finan-
cial transactions between organizations and
customers. Most commentators now consider
e-commerce to refer to allelectronically medi-
ated transactions between an organization and
any third party it deals with. By this definition,