From the Preface: In the past few years the Internet has gone through several phasesfrom obscurity through hype all the way to being a simple fact of life today. Almost as soon as the Internet was privatized, marketers staked their turf and sought to use the medium to further the goals of the firm in various ways. While there are numerous books on the subject of marketing using the Internet, all tend to be practitioner-oriented and focused solely on computer nuts and bolts. This book discusses many of those same nuts and bolts, but places them in the context of mar-keting strategy, consumer behavior, advertising, and the other business topics that make marketing different than computer programming.
In fact, the two words of the title of this textbook, Internet Marketing, neatly sum up the two disciplines it brings together. The book has both an Internet component and a marketing component. No doubt instructors will vary in terms of how much Internet coverage theyll include in a course. This book is therefore designed to let the instructor add as little or as much of the Internet component as he or she feels comfortable including. Wherever possible, the technical details of networked computing have been segregated so as to allow the instructor to omit them if desired. For example, when the HTML page-creation language is discussed in terms of its impact on the consumer, those discussions are circum-scribed to a side box. In addition, Chapter 2, What Exactly Is the Internet?,
Chapter 5, How to Create Web Pages, and Chapter 14, The Mechanics of Electronic Commerce can be skipped without any harm being done to the over-all narrative.
The printed textbook is really just one-half of the materials for this course the other half being a companion Web site which is also a critical component. The text and the associated Web site have been designed from the start to complement each other. While some books have supporting Web sites, the site and this book play a more nearly equal role in the case of Internet Marketing. Our aim in devel-oping the set was to capitalize on the strength of each medium, and so the goal in the design process was to use each medium for what it does best. The textbook most efficiently teaches the key concepts and provides a serial narrative on the topic. The interactivity of the Internet, on the other hand, makes it ideal for providing student activities of various sorts such as hypertext cases and homework questions. The Internet is also unsurpassed in its ability to point students to live examples of the main points. And finally, the dynamic nature and timeliness of online publishing makes it perfect for producing pointers to current events that relate to class materials.
This book is arranged into five sections. The first section provides an introduction to the Internet. Subsequent sections focus on communication, selling, content development and creation, and providing network functionality. The finalsection serves as a catch-all for several miscellaneous topics that dont clearly belong in any of the other sections.
We are grateful to a number of instructors and professionals from around the world for their helpful reviews of this second edition of Internet Marketing: Reza Motameni, CSU Fresno
Kim Sheehan, University of Oregon
Pola Gupta, University of Northern Iowa
John Beaumont-Kerridge, University of Luton
Glenn B. Voss, North Carolina State University
Kathleen S. Micken, Roger Williams University
Barbara Bart
Edwin Tang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Donald Sciglimpaglia, San Diego State University
Paul Richardson, Loyola University
Margaret Kurko, College of the Siskiyous
Larisa Genin, Golden Gate University
Chantal Ladias, American College of Dublin
Michelle Nelson, Pacific University
Donna Green, University of Windsor
Mark Durkin, University of Ulster
Nanda Viswanathan, University of Redlands
Douglas Lowry, Franciscan University of Steubenville
