Content area
Full text
Saeed Samiee: Professor, Marketing Faculty, College of Business Administration, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
Attention to the role of the Internet in business activities has intensified, as evidenced by the growing volume of information on the subject in various business and trade publications. Academic inquiry on the subject has also accelerated with many contributions attempting to define the Internet's role in marketing and seeking new paradigms that appropriately incorporate this new medium in marketing theory. Little space, however, has been devoted to the potential role of the Internet in exporting. Nicknamed "the information superhighway", the Internet has the potential of resolving some long-standing problems associated with exporting. Information acquisition, market access, export promotion and the costs associated with these activities have been identified as critical impediments to export market entry and export volume growth for many firms (Czinkota and Johnston, 1983; Rabino, 1980; Samiee and Walters, 1990).
The purpose of this study is to explore the potential roles of the Internet in export marketing. As the Internet continues to grow at a rapid rate around the world and as the information technology industry is currently sharply focused on conceiving, developing, and marketing Internet-based software and products, it is difficult to imagine a universal framework that is all encompassing and applies equally to our current understanding of this medium, as well as to the many unforeseen applications that will evolve in the years to come. After all, the World Wide Web (WWW) was only conceived in 1989[1]. Furthermore, from a conceptual viewpoint, our understanding of the potential applications of the Internet in any business will necessarily be confined to our understanding of the existing paradigms that some have labeled as inappropriate vehicles for analyzing the subject (Deighton, 1997; Hoffman and Novak, 1996; Peterson et al., 1997).
To understand the role of the Internet in exporting, the Internet-export business dyad is examined and a conceptual framework is offered in Figure 1. To accomplish this, six axioms that constitute the foundation and the guiding principles by which the Internet might be applied to exporting situations are explored. Then the use of the Internet in exporting is explored in light of exporter type and its development stage. The exporter's use of the Internet is further affected by...