Proactive or reactive marketing? The influence of the Internet on direct marketing, Paper 3
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Alan Tapp is senior lecturer in marketing at Bristol Business School. He has over 13 years’ experience in commercial and academic marketing positions. He is the author of ‘Principles of direct and database marketing’ and has over 20 publications in the fields of direct marketing, branding, charity marketing and, latterly, sports marketing. He has advised and trained companies as diverse as The Royal Mail and Coventry City Football Club. His major current interests are the strategic underpinnings of e-commerce, and sports marketing.
Abstract The Internet is set to have an influence on direct and database marketing which is more profound than its standing as merely another media option. A number of writers have already commented on the Internet’s facility to shift power from businesses to customers, and hence change customers’ behaviour. For example, it could be that increasingly it will be customers who drive the process of going to market, and they who lead the contact with businesses, rather than the other way around. For businesses too, the Internet may change ways of working, by facilitating information flows such that information management becomes ever more important for companies. This final paper (of a series of three) reviews these and other Internet-related issues and discusses how they will affect direct and database marketing. One possibility is that instead of database marketers attempting to predict customer behaviour, a mixed approach is taken which allows customers to lead the contact, and this contact triggers a further marketing response from the business. Strategically, the company is then mixing reactive and proactive marketing to best advantage. A model describing this change is offered for further debate.
Dr Alan Tapp Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK. Tel: ⫹44 (0)117 344 3439; Fax: ⫹44 (0)117 344 2289; e-mail: [email protected]
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INTRODUCTION Making predictions about anything is fraught with difficulty. Predicting the future role of the Internet in business is a recipe for failure on a bigger scale. Those who predicted FTSE success for dot.coms are currently licking their wounds, but the role for academics is to try and look behind the wild mood swings of speculators in order to help set the foundations for new principles. In this spirit, this paper reviews the literature on the Internet that direct marketers should be concerned with, and
Journal of Database Marketing
Vol. 9, 3, 238–247
then proposes a small number of key areas that require further development. In assessing these, it is necessary to be mindful of both changes in customer behaviour and changes in company practice. Hence the discussion is divided into these two areas, and changes in customer behaviour are examined first. CHANGES IN CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR Bill Gates called the Web ‘friction free capitalism’. What he meant by this was
䉷 Henry Stewart Publications 1350-2328 (2002)
Proactive or reactive marketing? The influence of the Interne
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