Offer and Internet Marketing

¶ … Internet Marketing

Offer and Internet Market

Kotler (1972:50) mapped these functions directly to the 4Ps classification of product, price, place, and promotion. The product element of the marketing mix is also changed. For instance, Dell Computer offers a configuration engine at its site that can be used by the customer to designate changes to a basic computer model to include a different disk drive size, processor speed, screen size, memory size, operating system, software footprint, and so on. All of these settings represent hundreds of potential configurations that would be very costly to stock in a bricks-and-mortar retail setting. In addition, many Web sites include digital offerings or services, such as a consumer printing out a map obtained through the Yahoo.com Web site or viewing financial information about the stock market. Such digital delivery is a paradigm-shifting capability for many product categories, including music, video, jokes, maps, stock quotes, software, art, tickets, photos, and all fashions of written materials and thus a huge array of products and services. Aspects of the price can be handled in the e-marketing environment differently. An Internet market enables large-scale use of certain pricing mechanism, such as forward auctions, reverse auctions, dynamic pricing, and "name your own price" that are otherwise not widely feasible. The facilitation function maps to place in the marketing mix, and in the e-marketing context, it connotes the facilitation and location of the transaction. In traditional marketing, facilitation typically occurred at a location controlled by a third party such as a distributor or a retailer. However, in the context of e-marketing, facilitation can occur at the Web site of the manufacturer. In case of the promotion, online advertising (e.g., a banner ad or a popup ad, etc.) has been a natural extension of offline promotion. Some of the newer digital tools and techniques include sponsored links on search engines, outbound e-mail, and viral marketing.

Flexibility of Offers