Marketing is not just a Function

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In today's world, marketing is not just a function or operation; it is a way of doing business. It provides a systematic process of interaction between the customers and the organization (Groucutt et al., 2004). Currently, e-marketing plays a major role in marketing field. It offers a wide range of opportunities for marketing the products and services across the purchase cycle. It involves the process of identifying, forecasting and satisfying the customer requirements profitably (Chaffey and Smith, 2005). However, the importance of e-marketing varies for different organizations based on customers' buying behaviour, media, shareholders or other partners. Many of the researchers had identified that, e-marketing strategies are radically changing and it will also continue to change the marketing thoughts and practices in international markets (Sheth and Sharma, 2005). This essay will critically analyse the opportunities and the issues faced by e-marketing in the emerging marketing practices.

Benefits of e-marketing

The core advantages of e-marketing is reducing costs and increasing reach. The cost of an e-marketing platform is usually lower than other marketing platforms such as middleman or distributors, or face-to-face salespeople. For example, food retailers like Asda, Morrison and Tesco, food manufacturers such as Dominos and BakinBoys, and service firms like Pizza Hut are effectively using e-marketing strategies to reduce costs and increase their reach (Samiee and Roth, 1992). In addition, e-marketing allows organizations to reach customers that may not be attainable due to location and temporal limitations of existing distribution channels. Using e-marketing strategies, the marketing firm can offer unlimited information to customers without any human intervention. Additionally, and more vitally, the information can be offered in a form that customers can easily understand and process (Sharma and Sheth, 2004). E-marketing firms can also create interactions by customizing data for individual customers that allows customers to customize products and services as per their specific requirements. For example, online checking and seat reservation can be done on the internet (Watson et al., 2002).

E-marketing platforms help to introduce customer driven manufacturing in the firms. For example, over the last decade many of the food processing industries had adopted online order taking facilities to cope up their high logistics demands from its customers (Donk, 2000). It reduces the customers' locational dependence and provides a way for easy availability. For business customers, rather than depending on a geographical or locational sales force, the e-marketing allows customers to more readily involve in direct, order taking and technical support. Hence, e-marketing has changed the focus of usual marketing from a "supplier perspective" to a "customer perspective", that is, reverse marketing. Rather than marketers manufacturing and then looking for orders, manufacturing will start only when the customer orders. E-marketing progressively makes the marketing operation responsible for "supply management" (Donk et al., 2008).

One of the latest trends in e-marketing is advertising through social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. It has opened a way for small and local businesses to reach their customer base as never before (Yang et al., 2007). Social networking sites provide opportunities for the businesses to reach a specific target with specific demographic, such as college students and young professionals and it also helps the firms to deliver their message in a specific way (Pacheco and Hernanandez, 2007). Apart from social network marketing there are also some other medium of online marketing are existing which includes, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing and marketing through company's website. But social network marketing plays a major role in e-marketing compared to other medium. According to Mashable (2009) survey report, 25 percent of the small businesses planned to increase their money spending on social network marketing and 33 percent announced that they would keep spending on social networking about the same as they spent earlier, while only 5 percent reported that they plan to spend money less than in the previous year. Finally, 37 percent of the small businesses in the survey are not planning to use social network marketing, which is smaller percentage than any other medium of e-marketing.

Next to social network marketing e-mail marketing plays a vast role in e-marketing. The main advantages of e-mail marketing are, e-mail is inexpensive and time saving, it creates quick response cycles and its marketing campaign results are measurable, it helps to strengthen the brand awareness and customer relationships, and finally it is easy to implement and requires limited resources (DMA, 2003). According to Forrester (2006) research, the value of European e-mail marketing will increase by 12 percent per annum, hitting 2.3 billion GBP in 2012. Also, e-mail marketing has the highest return of investment (ROI) index among all marketing channels. Hence the social network marketing and e-mail marketing enhances the possibilities for promotion and marketing efforts of the firms.

Tackling the problems in e-marketing

One of the major problems in e-marketing is the unpredictability of emergence of new technology. This leads the firms to focus continuously on new technologies rather than traditional media (Zwass, 1998). From the buyer's perspective, the inability of consumers to touch, smell or taste the products is acting as a limitation. However, there is an industry standard for e-business vendors to reassure customers by following some standard return policies as well as offering in-store pick-up services to gain the customers' trust (Hoffman and Novak, 1996). According to the survey conducted by MediaPost (2008) publications, many of the large companies listed the following as the barriers to entry for e-marketing: inadequate metrics to measure impact, difficulty of convincing senior management, lack of internal capabilities and limited reach of digital tools.

Many customers are hesitant to purchase things over the internet because they do not believe that their personal information will remain secure and private (Lazarevic and Sohal, 2004). This will raise the ethical issues in e-marketing. That is, misuse of customers' information can cause negative impacts on the reputation of the firm and endanger its competitive advantage. Maintaining the privacy of the information is highly important for an organization's reputation. This kind of security problem can be resolved by adopting dual-key encryption method in order to ensure that the hackers cannot access the secured data. Threats to privacy involve the use of website data, customers' transactional data and the internet (Lazarevic and Sohal, 2004). However, many of the developed countries have created e-business codes to handle such kind of ethical issues. At present these ethical codes are accepted at the global level. E-business ethics comprise both business ethics and computer ethics and it is jointly known as information system ethics or cyber ethics (Johnson, 1998; Weber, 2000).

Providing adequate information to the customers is one of the important aspects in e-marketing. Lack of adequate information about the products or services would lead the firms to disadvantageous position against their competitors and the external environment. Hence, the up-to-date, accessible and timely information about the industry, competitors, customers, markets and new technology are the critical factors for an organization to plan and compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace (Siegel, 2004).

E-marketing and Cafe 21 Hospitality Group

Cafe 21 Hospitality Group is currently not involved in e-marketing techniques and they involved only on "word-of-mouth" marketing. The Group could advertise their products and services in social networking websites to attract more customers, because social networking sites are currently accessed in large number of people especially by the youngsters. By advertising through social networking websites they can also involve in promotional activities by creating conversations and communities in those sites and by responding directly to comments and questions posted on the sites. Currently, they are offering e-mail services and online reservations to their customers; they could also adopt an advanced data mining technology which is currently popular in restaurant businesses for marketing, sales and customer relationship management. Finally, the customer database can be managed securely through the adoption of e-business code of ethics to gain customers' trust.

Conclusion

After analysing the opportunities and issues of e-marketing, it is evident that the e-marketing has high scope towards marketing and promotional efforts of the firm. Even though some of the marketing problems exist related to technology, impacts and internal capabilities, the available evidence shows that, many of the firms have successfully adopted e-marketing strategies and earned profits and customers' support. The ethical issues of e-marketing could create hesitation among customers, but it can be deal by the adoption of e-business code of ethics and through the implementation of appropriate encryption method in order to build the firm's reputation. Finally, and more importantly the firm should provide sufficient information about their products and services while e-marketing, because providing insufficient customers would lead to customers' misconception and adverse position against their rivals.

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