During the past decade, developments such as the rapid growth of the Internet, digitization of information products, and digitization of the information attributes of non-information products, has necessitated businesses to fundamentally rethink, as well as institute major changes in, their marketing strategies. Against this backdrop, we present a critical assessment of extant research on marketing strategy in an Internet-enabled environment viewed through the lens of research published in previous volumes of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM), and speculate on the future of interactive marketing in the contexts of marketing practice, research in marketing and marketing education. Looking back, it is evident that marketing strategy and marketing operations have been transformed by the Internet in many ways. Looking ahead, it can be expected that marketing strategy and marketing operations will be even more extensively integrated and blended in the Internet-enabled market environment in the future.
The evolution of the marketplace into an Internet-enabled market environment and the digitization of information products, over the past decade, have had a major impact on contemporary marketing thought and practice. For a growing number of products, the competitive landscape has evolved from a predominantly physical marketplace to one encompassing the physical marketplace and the electronic marketplace—an Internet-enabled market environment. The term digital revolution is widely used to refer to the rapid advances in technology underlying the production of information products in digital form and their marketing and distribution over the Internet. These technological advances have also significantly impacted the marketing of non-information products as a consequence of the digitization of their information attributes.
Against this backdrop, this paper provides a retrospective and a prospective on marketing strategy in an Internet-enabled interactive environment. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. First, we briefly discuss marketing strategy in an Internet-enabled environment and propose an organizing framework. Second, we provide a review, synthesis and critique of research on marketing strategy in an Internet-enabled environment viewed through the lens of research published in previous volumes of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM). Given that research focusing on issues pertaining to marketing strategy and the Internet has been published in a number of other major journals as well, the scope of our review and synthesis is admittedly modest, since it is limited to relevant articles published in the first ten volumes of the JIM (1998–2007). Third, we speculate on the future of interactive marketing and avenues for future research. We conclude the paper by drawing attention to the potential impact of emerging Web 2.0 technologies on marketing.
During the past decade, developments such as the rapid growth of the Internet, digitization of information products, and digitization of the information attributes of non-information products, has necessitated businesses to fundamentally rethink, as well as institute major changes in their marketing strategies. Effective integration of the Internet into a firm's marketing strategy and marketing operations is increasingly becoming a competitive imperative. In fact, judging from recent business developments and trends reviewed in JIM (Barwise and Farley, 2005, Brodie et al., 2007 and Sultan and Rohm, 2004), this already appears to be happening in a number of industries and product-markets.
The findings of a recent global survey of executives (The McKinsey Quarterly 2007) focusing on current and planned investments by companies in various Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., Web services, collective intelligence, peer-to-peer networking, social networking, really simple syndication, podcasts, wikis, blogs, and mash-ups) are particularly noteworthy from the standpoint of their potential impact on marketing. 70% of the respondents report using some combination of Web 2.0 technologies to interface with customers (customer-to-business feedback, customer services, entering new markets and acquiring new customers in existing markets), 75% to manage collaboration internally (product design and development and knowledge management), and 51% to interface with suppliers and partners (purchasing, better interface integration and better communication). Interestingly, in a follow-up survey (The McKinsey Quarterly 2008), only 21% of the executives reported being satisfied with their firms' efforts to deploy Web 2.0 tools and technologies. Thus, while many important elements of the future seem to be already all around us, many unresolved questions and issues still remain for further exploration.
