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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Successful e-commerce decision makers and webmasters have to think holistically about every detail of their websites. There are a lot of strategic marketing decision models for brick and mortar stores that are without modification directly applicable to ecommerce. However, to be totally effective e-commerce has to create its own unique strategic models that facilitate critical thinking about web designs. This paper offers such a model (called the HIMEM- Holistic Internet Marketing Exchange Model). The HIMEM proposes looking at websites as four distinct selling units under which website atmospherics and seller/buyers relationships may be evaluated.
Keywords: Atmospherics, Marketing, Internet, Customer Relationship Management, Web Development
INTRODUCTION
Modern domestic and international business environments (e.g., strong domestic competition, information highways, reengineering, pre- and post-modern consumerism, technological "speak," workplace diversity, standardization versus localization, temperamental domestic and foreign governmental legislators and regulators) present Internet marketers with anticipated and unanticipated situations that demand dynamic decision making skills. This paper offers a prospectus for viewing Internet marketing under holistic (seeing the "big picture") thinking, integrative thinking, lateral thinking, associative thinking, parallel thinking, cause and effect thinking, and if-then thinking. A paradigm called the Holistic Internet Marketing Exchange Model (HIMEM) has been created for this purpose. The acronym HIMEM describes how, and when Internet business parties engage in the give and take of negotiating the terms of the exchange relationship, each party contemplates two basic questions: "What's in it for me?" and "What do I have to give him in order that I get what I want?" The HIMEM process is presented:
1. Traditional tools; such as Branding
2. The construct of four (4) distinct sellers and three (3) distinct buyers
3. HIMEM's Internet Marketing Exchange Model
4. The Identification of the 4-Sellers and 3-Buyers
5. The use of the exchange model to identify the four sellers and three buyers; and
6. An integrative and holistic thinking process.
BRANDING
There is a solid reason why organizations are adopting the Internet as a way of doing business. The Internet provides a mechanism for retailers to efficiently, effectively, and frugally interact with their customers. Organizations can spend millions of dollars developing their sites only to realize that customer satisfaction and loyalty have actually declined (Maling, 2002). Many organizations fail to realize that it...