Abstract:

In today's high-tech, high-speed markets, as organizations seek more effective ways to reach and hold increasingly unreachable and untenable customers, the application of information technologies (IT) to the processes of marketing has become an important source of competitive advantage. This new marketing involves relationships, networks and continuous interactions. Information technology is not new. What is new is the digital revolution and the convergence of three IT streams: computers, consumer electronics and telecommunications. What is also new is IT's growing pervasiveness into virtually every aspect to do with running a business. In effect, IT has moved from the back end of the business system to the front end - from the accounting department to the process of research and development and thence to the production floor, to the marketing and selling functions, and finally to customer servicing. For some firms, IT has become the aspect of the relationship that customers value most, as the lines between the firm and its dealers and customers get blurred into a smooth, "seamless" network of relationships that are the result not just of fundamental changes in the processes of marketing, but the processes of doing business itself. The objectives of this paper are to: 1. Examine some of the ways in which information technologies are fundamentally changing the processes of marketing; 2. Present a "model" of how tomorrow's information intensive automobile manufacturer is likely to undertake its "relationship marketing" activities; 3. Suggest some important implications for various organizational functions, including marketing, market research, advertising, selling and servicing. One might ask: "Why will we need these as separate functions?"