Internet Interpersonal Relationship Marketing

Author: Social Sciences Press
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-05-01
Features: The bubble of new economy concept stocks has burst after a surge, but the new economy is not a big bubble. As the prophets of the new economy predicted, the internet phenomenon has returned as a continuous one. More and more people are going online, and there are increasingly diverse online lifestyles. All businesses will go digital, or else.
Excerpt: Principles of Online Marketing
1. How to Face Consumers in the E-Age
In the information society, human relationships are no longer limited by space. Informal channels of communication connect the world, making distant places feel close. Friends are everywhere, and everyone demonstrates and imitates each other, breaking down distance barriers. The impact includes:
- Globalization of consumer behavior, with rapid and far-reaching communication.
- Greater "niche" specialization of consumer symbols, where various trendy and styles sweep across the globe, bringing one after another consumer subcultures.
Within the internet, society is breaking down constructions while rebuilding them. New identities constantly emerge, making the original traits and tastes that required long-term interaction more diverse, fragmented, and superficial. People chase different niche symbols, breaking down the limitations of class, status, race, age, gender, region, and religion in social segmentation, pursuing a dynamic self. When face-to-face interactions with detailed emotional expressions and mutual feelings diminish, online interpersonal interactions rely more on the manipulation and identification of symbols.
Marketing based on symbol consumption will no longer see mass media as the main player. Instead, "niche" websites become key. For example, future car companies will allow consumers to pre-order new cars online before production. They can see the three-dimensional design of the car from all angles—front, back, 360-degree rotation, open the door to view the interior, open the hood to examine the mechanical design, and even test-drive the car virtually to test its performance.
Symbols are created and circulated within the computer network, shaping consumer identity and imitation through the network. The focus of e-commerce is marketing, but marketing is not a natural occurrence. It is the strategy and actions developed by a company's marketing personnel. However, doing business online is different from doing it in the physical world. Your product may not be the consumer's final choice. Instead, consumers can easily and quickly compare products, dissatisfaction with your service, disagreement with your company's pricing, and the ability to switch attention and leave at any time. The result of mass communication is often just a large number of fleeting glances. In the age of information overload, people receive thousands of consumer messages daily, and they can only glance over them without leaving a trace.
Too much information and too much information anxiety make consumers seek agents to filter consumer information, not endless spam. Therefore, in the virtual world of the internet, providing consumers with the information they truly need to win their loyalty is far more important than selling products. Thus, managing customer data and offering appropriate information services become the most important marketing strategies. This strategy aims to capture customer loyalty to provide personalized information services, allowing products to sell naturally within the service. Therefore, managing customers is more important than managing products.
Today, online marketing has failed to generate profits for virtual stores because everyone treats the internet as a "mass communication medium," calling it a media revolution, while ignoring that the internet should be an "interactive medium" and a communication revolution. We should not see the internet as a replacement for television but as a replacement for telephones and faxes. Traditional marketing tools are limited by media characteristics, allowing only one-way message transmission. The internet, however, not only has multimedia capabilities but also enables two-way interaction with consumers.
Past marketing methods emphasizing market share aimed to leave the deepest impression on as many people as possible, forcing dazzling product images onto high-traffic media. Consumers could only passively accept or reject marketing messages. Today's internet users, however, have the power to choose actively. Internet browsers are very free, and they can always search and compare similar products online. Therefore, the control of marketing messages lies with consumers.
Three years ago, the internet entered its second phase of development, known as the mass-market period, with representative websites like AOL and Yahoo. AOL was one of the earliest portal sites to centralize various services, attracting many visitors. This innovation led to the rise of the portal site war, after which companies adopted multi-brand strategies to attract different groups of visitors with tailored appeals. Mass-market internet communication quickly entered the "niche" era. For example, in Taiwan, websites like "" developed loyalty among different groups through niche marketing, such as women-focused lifestyle sites and children's entertainment sites. PChome initially launched with ten themed channels, catering to increasingly niche audiences. The goal of this fragmentation is to win visitor loyalty, allowing different-oriented visitors to become habitual customers on websites tailored to "their kind."
To truly implement this marketing concept, personalized services for customers are essential. Yahoo's personalized website serves this purpose. This is achievable online and is the most cost-effective one-to-one marketing tool, which is the niche of online marketing.
How to leverage this online marketing niche? First, grasp the following principles.
2. Principle One: Leverage the Two Major Advantages of the Internet
If the mass-market sales model is simply moved online, online shopping would only replace mail-order and TV shopping, with a rather dim future. Even in the highly developed mail-order market in the U.S., it only accounts for less than 5% of the consumer retail market. In Taiwan, the mail-order industry has also been unsuccessful. We must ask: why can't mail-order penetrate over 95% of the retail market?
B2C e-commerce has the potential to far exceed the achievements of mass media and open a market ten times larger than mail-order. However, this requires developing new business models and fully leveraging the internet's two major advantages to expand and create new opportunities.
Allen, Kania, and Yaeckel, authors of the book "Marketing AnyTime-AnyPlace on the Internet" (translated and published by EC Press), summarize previous research, noting that the internet has two major advantages over mass media: interactivity and data collection. The former allows for relationships to form through interaction, communities to be built, making relationship marketing and word-of-mouth marketing possible. The latter helps understand consumers' lifestyles and consumption habits, enabling personalized products and services through one-to-one marketing. Leveraging these two advantages is the strategy for success online.
Effective online marketing must utilize both interactivity and data collection. Simply transferring offline marketing strategies online will be inefficient. Therefore, the focus of this book is on how to use virtual communities and consumer database personal information for relationship marketing.
3. Principle Two: Develop Online Communities and Relationship Marketing
The internet's greatest impact on the "postmodern" social life is the formation of online communities. The formation of online communities reverses urbanization and mass-market trends, where the power of niches and communities will dominate social life. Unlike pre-industrial societies, people are no longer tied to a single community for education, healthcare, and daily life but live in both mass and community environments, with multiple communities and greater freedom to choose, join, or leave.
Social life influences consumer behavior. The marketing strategies for virtual communities include creating a living space for community members online based on interest themes, socio-economic backgrounds, or real-life communities. These spaces are free for members to create content, attract like-minded individuals, and build niche groups. This approach provides a foundation for niche marketing by concentrating similar people in one place and fostering community loyalty among members, creating relationships and leveraging community opinions for marketing.
The key to relationship marketing is to build relationships before engaging in marketing. This includes using opinion leaders for word-of-mouth marketing, maintaining relationships with agents and customers for interactive marketing, and using data mining techniques to analyze consumer behavior for in-depth understanding and personalized marketing.
Online communities, with their interactive and data collection capabilities, enable these marketing methods to thrive.
4. Principle Three: Master Customer Lifetime Value
The foundation of one-to-one marketing lies in personal data. Once a website has personal data, it can capture consumer relationships and control a customer's lifetime value. Marketing expert Allen believes that future online marketing must adopt a "two-way" approach, first "capturing" one-to-one relationships with consumers before selling products. Otherwise, visitors have the power to leave at any time.
What is "customer capture"? In mass production and consumption economies, companies use standardized products and economies of scale to reduce costs, then maximize marketing efforts. Higher market share leads to larger production volumes, lower costs, and higher profits. In contrast, one-to-one marketing focuses on expanding relationships with individual customers, offering diverse products to the same consumer. The more customer relationships a company captures and the more products it sells to each customer, the higher the profits.
Imagine eToys collecting data on expectant parents from BabyCenter, analyzing their socio-economic background, consumption patterns, and purchasing power. They then recommend Pampers diapers for babies, signing a one-year contract with parents to deliver diapers regularly based on the baby's growth stages. This is convenient and allows for bulk purchase discounts. Similarly, and baby health foods can also be contracted for multi-year, regular supply.
When eToys realizes the baby is three years old and parents are concerned about his education, a series of cartoons, music albums, and educational software can be promoted through community discussions and word-of-mouth. Think about the business opportunities from age three to ten. This is the value of "customer capture," and this is where the value of online marketing lies.