Chapter 1: Categories of Internet Marketing

Categories of Internet Marketing Assignment

We categorize the types of marketing taking place on the Web as communicating, selling, providing content, or providing a Network function.

We can categorize these four activities even further. Content and Network function sites are primary marketing efforts, meaning that the site itself is the product or the service being offered. These sites exist for their own sake and need to pay for themselves. Primary sites are wholly virtual, meaning that the entire transaction takes place on the Internet.

Communication and selling sites are secondary, since the purpose of both of these kinds of sites is to help in marketing some physical product or service that exists off of the Internet.

We can also divide sites up into whether they are simply providing information, as is the case with communication and content sites, or whether they are performing some action, as would be the case with selling or providing a Network function. Here are some typical examples of all four categories:

  Provide
Information		 Perform
a Function
Primary Content Sites attract browsers with data or entertainment:
Lyng Satellite · MBA Info · Space Daily · Nando Times · Jumbo · Stim · Map Blast · Research-It · Yahoo! Italia · Riddler Netsurfer Digest · Bonus.com · The Knot · CareerPath.com 		Network Utilities perform Internet tasks:
Real Media · Yahoo! Groups · Jump City · Hotbot · Juno · Liszt · Alexa · eBay Auctions · Proxy Vote ·
Secondary Promotional Sites communicate about a product or service:
MyFlorida.com · Bike Helmet Safety Institute · Silicon Graphics · Ethan Allen · Babylon 5 · Olsen & Assoc. · Bonne Bell · Cane Creek · Trust for Public Land · Spath-Bjorklund Associates 		Selling Sites directly market to the consumer:
Virtual Vineyards · Single Search · TRIP.com · Dell Computer · NetBride · Charles Schwab

Your Assignment

  1. Are these four categories mutually exclusive, or can a site belong to more than one category? If you think a site can be in more than one category, be sure to defend your view by citing an example. The example you pick does not have to come from the above list.

  2. For each of the four types, what is the payoff to the firm that owns the site? In other words, where does the revenue come from for each of the four types? Describe the business model for each of the four types of sites. Be sure to point out the fiscal return a business would expect for each type of Web site.


  3. Using any means at your disposal, provide one additional example of each of the four main types of Web sites.


  4. Effective marketing strategy and tactics generally differ between products and services. For content sites, is the offering more like a service, a product, or neither? How about for Network utilities, that is, sites that perform a Network function? You might want to consider the following four factors: Compared to products, services are said to be:
    • Heterogeneous or variable. For example one haircut can easily differ from another in terms of quality, but every bottle of Coca-Cola is identical.
    • Perishable or short-lived. Once the service has been performed, it is over. Services cannot be stored or inventoried. A product like a bottle of Coke can hang around in the refrigerator for a long time. Once a plane takes off, however, any unsold seats remain unsold. They cannot be inventoried for sale at a later time.
    • Intangible or lacking physical attributes. A Coke bottle is a concrete object. A checking account has some paper, but it is more of an abstraction than a physical good.
    • Inseparable.
      The idea of inseparability has implications in three areas of service strategy.
      • First, the distance between the service provider and the consumer must be small for the service to be provided. Your haircutter must be near you while she or he is performing the service but the people who build your car could be thousands of miles away
      • Second, often it is difficult to separate the service provider from the service itself. In effect the service provider becomes the service, and a customer's attitudes and opinions about the person providing service often translate into attitudes toward the service. You may be willing to buy Kellogg's cereals even if you don't like a particular grocery store cashier. On the other hand, being poorly treated by a waiter may prevent you from ever returning to a restaurant.
      • Finally, service providers often depend on customers to carry out part of the service. If a physician gives you medicine with the instructions, "Take one tablet every 8 hours," but you don't follow those instructions, you may not get well very quickly. You may conclude that the individual was a "bad doctor" when the fault really was your own.



  5. Marketing tactics have historically been divided into the categories of price, product, promotion, and place (or distribution). Describe selling sites in terms of the four p's.


  6. Donna L. Hoffman, Thomas P. Novak, and Patrali Chatterjee of Vanderbilt University offer a different way of categorizing Internet marketing in their article, "Commercial Scenarios for the Web." Compare Hoffman et al.'s categorization scheme with the current one.
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