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An empirical study is reported which attempts both to improve marketing practice whilst developing key aspects of marketing and resource-based theory. The thesis describes how firms can develop marketing competencies to exploit emerging online marketing technology and business opportunities. In doing so, the thesis provides empirical evidence that opens up what is widely acknowledged in the literature as "the black box of resources". Specifically, it explores the way marketing competencies develop as the result of investment in complementary marketing resources and conscious management activity. A literature review is presented which identifies generic marketing competencies and how they are expressed across a continuum of three forms of marketing: transaction, relationship and network. From this insight, the researcher develops a framework and a set of tools that help managers identify their firms' current marketing competencies and develop future marketing competencies needed to implement their marketing strategies. A co-operative inquiry research design is developed that permits managers to use and develop further these frameworks and tools, improve their day-to-day practice and contribute to academic literature and theory. The experience of two sets of managers trying to develop their firms' online marketing competencies through co-operative inquiry is presented. One inquiry is with a highly successful dot. com and the other the UK division of a leading automotive manufacturer. The findings from each are compared and the researcher develops contributions to both theory and practice. The contributions confirm and illuminate much of the extant, conceptually-grounded dynamic capabilities literature. The major implication for marketing theory and practice is that online consumer relationships can only develop incrementally along a continuum of marketing competencies. Details as to how these marketing competencies develop and change are discussed. Secondary contributions involve economics and the nature of co- operative inquiry within a marketing context. The validity of co-operative inquiry, and therefore of this research, is discussed in detail. Limitations of the research and its future directions are discussed.

Buyer-supplier relationships are said to be developing toward more collaborative forms based on hierarchical cooperation and away from adversarial forms based on market competition. However, proponents of transaction cost economics (TCE) have predicted that e-commerce would lead to more competitive relationships because e-commerce reduces transaction costs. Several theories have been employed in formulating the research framework for this study to explain these seemingly contradictory positions. The main underpinning for the conceptual framework of the research is based on the rationale of TCE, the dichotomy between market and hierarchy; while other theories, relational exchange theory (RET) and resource dependence theory (RD F) are used to complement TCE. This integrative view that combines TCE, RET and RDT proposes the research hypothesis that utilization of e-commerce will facilitate a collaborative relationship between buyer and supplier both directly and via the mediating roles of assets specificity, trust and dependence. A questionnaire-based survey has been carried out into the Korean electronics industry since electronics industries of Korea are well developed, and the business culture of Korean industry is similar to that of other Asian countries. Exploratory factor analysis has been conducted on the data collected by the survey to discover the underlying structure for the questionnaire items. Structural equation modelling using AMOS Graphic 4.0 has been employed to test the research hypothesis. Focusing on buyers (suppliers) and their key suppliers (buyers) in the electronics industry, this empirical study provides a support for the view that utilization of e-commerce is reconciled with growing tendency toward collaboration as an interaction strategy in an industrial market. This study claims that e-commerce contributes to building a long-term collaborative relationship rather than a transactional exchange for short-term economic gain. In addition, depersonalization caused by e-commerce has not happened yet, and electronic interconnection consolidates assets specificity, trust and dependence and collaborative relationship between trading partners either direct or indirect way.

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No description available.

Theory suggests that firms that adopt innovation share some common characteristics, just as those who do not adopt innovation and firms adopt a particular technology because the functions provided by the chosen technology fulfils their needs. Building on these arguments, this research project investigates the antecedents and consequences of e-business adoption among manufacturing firms in Malaysia. This thesis develops from the existing literature of organisational innovation adoption, information technology and strategic marketing/management. It further adds to the existing literature by using cultural-based predictors representing organisational characteristics consisting of market orientation, innovativeness and organisational learning. The study also formalises the theoretical framework of organisational-environment-technology. This study develops a new construct called technology motivation in addition to the introduction of several e-business technology scales. The results substantiate the significance of firm technology motivation in determining firm adoption of the various e-business initiatives. In addition, business environment and market orientation are found to influence firm choice of technology motivation. Meanwhile, innovativeness and organisational learning are shown to influence the magnitude of a firm’s e-business adoption. Finally, the results show that firm adoption of e-business technology does not influence organisational performance. This investigation clarifies the rationale and importance of firm technology motivation in adopting the various e-business initiatives. It also highlights the importance of having the appropriate organisational culture in ensuring a successful technology adoption.

The research carried out aimed to illuminate how innovation arises and spreads within an SME internal environment. SMEs are an area where innovations can be readily identified and the company size makes tracking the spread of innovations possible. B2C e-commerce was chosen because the sector is smaller and thus more manageable than B2B. The period chosen (1997-2003) was a period where companies, especially SMEs, had to deal simultaneously with technological change, market change and organizational change and this called for a good deal of innovation and innovation management. Since IT is used to enable both business and marketing innovations it provides a good thematic link between the areas of innovation and Internet marketing. Thus innovations, especially in Internet marketing and advertising, were analysed further and compared to popular predictions. An empirical analysis of nineteen innovations from SME case companies in several EU nations revealed the importance of a hitherto underrated type of innovation similar to inspiration and here called 'Diversity Innovation'. It is postulated that it is 'Diversity Innovation' which is the major driving force in SMEs, because SMEs are typically cut off from invention innovation. Furthermore - by using simple algebra - it was seen that it is the transaction costs associated with communication that are the limiting factor for 'Diversity Innovation'. The logical consequence of this is that the major management challenge for growing SMEs occurs around size 50 employees. This is in stark contrast to conventional nomenclature, which ignores this important division and lumps all 10-99 employee companies together as 'small enterprises'. The analyses also showed innovation nuclei - the persons around whom the innovations crystallized - to be individuals with multiple specialist backgrounds. This is interpreted as again pointing towards the importance of transaction costs for communication between specialists, because transaction costs are lower when the individual is multiply specialized. Trans-nationals (trans-migrants, 'foreigners', here called CED's; people ,culturally and/or ethnically dífferent from the people in the SME's home nation) were especially prominent amongst innovation nuclei and it {s speculated that this group had been exposed to especially high retraining pressures. CED's in small companies active in immature markets experienced little difficulty in gaining acceptance for their innovations. Conversely, CEO's in companies within mature markets experienced great difficulty in spreading innovations within their environment, and the most likely explanation is because of the large distance (the 'Innovation Gap') between the CEO involved and the leadershlp/consensus group, as defined by Adaption-Innovation theory. Indeed, 'in mature markets, initial innovations by CEO's provoked a Trickle Down effect, this rebound often taking the form of disenfranchisement of the CED involved, who saw their ideas transformed into a consensus group concept, from which they were excluded, resulting in de-motivation and the consequent restriction in the generation and spread of innovation in the corporate environment. Whilst qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques were used in research into innovation, research into Internet Marketing were analysed by quantitative techniques and showed that many generally assumed popular concepts are misleading. Results at variance with accepted wisdom included: • Market transparency on the Internet is quite restricted and open to manipulation by suppliers. • There was no evidence that URL submissions to web search engines will improve sales. • There was no evidence that communication between the company and those clients requesting information, improved sales. • There was no evidence that 'chat' or other peer-to-peer web facilities improved sales. • Returning customers are few and it is their satisfaction with the product, not with the web site, that determined if they return. • A very high background rate of random hits, as opposed to customers, makes analysing web statistics a fruitless task. Conversely sales statistics can be used to prioritise which products are given good web coverage. • Bulk e-mailing of offers may be a less successful method for achieving sales than a web site is. • On-line payment is not a great advantage because third-party payment gateways and even the company bank, mostly fail to support the small merchant. • Intemiedlatlon amongst SME partners lacks adequate support, but dis- and re-intermediation is not rapid. 1997-2003 was a time when Internet knowledge was scarce and popular predictions from this period were chillingly wrong for SMEs. Those companies where such knowledge was part of their core competencies - and thus may have relied less on popular predictions - succeeded most, but overstepping core competencies, or where the leadership/consensus group kept them rigidly partitioned from the necessary technical knowledge, resulted in potentially serious negative consequences. To avoid this it is suggested that SME management should include a two-way 'innovation pipeline' for companies with around 120 employees or more.

This thesis describes research carried out in order to help solve the problem of personalization in e-commerce/CRM system. Web-based personalization consists of activities, such as providing customised information, that tailor the user's Web experience- browsing a Web site or purchasing a product, for example-to that user's particular needs. The main research objective of the project is to investigate how XSLT technologies can be used for the development of matching engines that find XML represented products that match the tastes, needs or requirements of customers as captured in customer profiles, also represented in XML. More specifically our research investigates into novel algorithms for transforming XML based product specifications using rules that derive from mining customer profiles with the purpose of customizing the product information.