Preface to the Focus Theme Section: 'Internet Marketing'

Internet marketing enables new forms of vertical communication and marketing between suppliers and customers in a traditional marketing sense, and also generates the potential for horizontal networks of customers interacting with each other to share information and experiences about specific products and services. Marketers have always used promotional activities such as advertising and product offers to share information about new products with consumers through general media campaigns based on TV, newspapers, journals and billboard advertising in addition to storebased promotions and product offers. As mass media becomes more fragmented, the internet starts to play an increasingly important role in the dissemination and sharing of such product information, and the consumer can become much more active in the generation, manipulation and communication of the marketing message that was traditionally tightly controlled by the commercial organizations advertising campaigns. McKinsey (2007), in a survey of leading marketing executives worldwide predicts that by 2010, the majority of consumers will use the web to inform their choice of purchase and a third will carry out a proportion of their purchasing online. Estimates of web sales as a proportion of total retail sales vary but it seems likely that by 2010 web sales will account for between 15 and 20% of total retail sales. The changing patterns of communication between and among customers and suppliers will therefore affect all of the marketing stages of adoption from customer awareness, attitude, lead generation and validation through to the trial of products, sales and customer retention. It is therefore important to understand how the new technologies and marketing concepts can be exploited from a commercial perspective and also to identify research opportunities that will be generated as a result of a wave of innovative marketing practices centred on the use of internet technology and in the context of the overall marketing mix.