18.6: The World Wide Web: New Model for Electronic Marketing

18.6 The World Wide Web: New Model for Electronic Marketing

The WWW is a form of hypermedia computer mediated environment (HCME) that is networked on a global scale. Basically an HCME is a networked system that allows the users of the system to interact in some way with the system. Both the sender and the receiver of the message can supply information to and interact with both each other, other people such as other users and with the system itself. This makes the WWW very different in form to other systems used in marketing and in particular in marketing communications at the present time. The telephone and other media allow for certain amount of interaction, for example, people can telephone in to the local radio channel, and be heard by listeners participating in the programme. However, the interactivity provided by the WWW goes much further than this. As mentioned earlier, users not only interact with the sender of the commercial message, but with other users of the system and contribute material to the system itself. It is this person interaction and this machine interaction that differentiates the web from other commercial media and has led to its widespread use and adoption as a marketing media (Hoffman and Novak, 1994).

Let us consider for a moment the standard one way simple model of marketing communication that we see in Figures 18.3 and 18.4. These have already been discussed in depth in Chapter 10. However discuss them here in a slightly different...