E-Marketing Is Getting Ambitious: Digging Deeper and Reaching Higher by Refining Our Assumptions

Online sellers have long been able to design a useful and aesthetically appealing Web site, collect detailed customer information, and develop electronic relationships with customers and suppliers. These practices are established, well tested and maturing, so electronic marketing is tackling larger problems these days. Researchers in e-marketing continue to: 1) ask big questions about what is possible, 2) test assumptions about e-marketing, and 3) develop new technologies, test them in conjunction with human behavior, and analyze them in sophisticated ways. E-marketing research is getting ambitious and it is refining many of its assumptions. This special issue presents some of the latest work in this area.

One widely held assumption is that eBay has become the king of online consumer- to-consumer auctions simply because it was a first-mover, has an attractive interface, and is well executed. It has succeeded and has a loyal community, but a closer analysis may show that eBay also owes its success to other reasons. A different auctioneer having deeper insights may be able to implement an auction market, perhaps with a business-to- business focus or in other countries where eBay does not have a major presence, and dethrone (or preempt) the king. In the first paper of this special section, Roumen Vragov uses an institutional analysis approach and laboratory experiments to explain why eBay dominates Internet auctions. His analytic and experimental findings suggest that the English auction procedures implemented by eBay (and others), encourage implicit collusive behavior among buyers, which decreases winning prices and lowers overall market efficiency. Ebay has prevailed, however, due to lesser overall time-related opportunity costs for buyers and sellers, as well as proxy bidding and the buy-it-now feature, which thwart the buyer tactics of jump-bidding and sniping. Hence, eBay is not simply the first-mover and first auction community, but an auction designer that includes pro-buyer and pro-seller features, thus ensuring itself liquidity.

A second assumption is that small firms adopt e-marketing techniques for the same reasons as large firms, or that they may simply imitate successful large firms whether it is prudent or not. A deeper analysis examining the motivations for small firms may reveal that they are still climbing the learning curve, that their adoption of e-commerce, including e-marketing, is different from that of large firms. Their needs follow their risk-aversiveness, and they may have yet to realize the gains that follow successful implementation of e-marketing practices. In their paper, Nancy Levenburg and Simha Magal examine this question. They use Importance-Performance Analysis to evaluate e-business strategies among small firms. Their analysis of more than 500 small firms concludes that they are in the early stages of implementing e-business, considering Marketing activities more important than Communications (e.g., with employees, partners, suppliers), Profitability, or Research activities. They also find that most small firms have lower performance in Marketing relative to its importance, whereas the other three groups of activities enjoy higher performance relative to importance. While the results indicate that small firms are tackling their most important area, Marketing, where the need is greatest, they will ultimately recognize the importance of the other activities, and proceeding cautiously, improve in those areas.

Another significant area of research in e-marketing is that of trust. While it is assumed to be fundamental, is trust simply earned by conducting business over a period of time and meeting or exceeding customer expectations? There are many models of trust, showing different antecedents and consequents (Gefen, Karahanna et al. 2003; Gefen and Straub 2003; Pavlou 2003; Suh and Han 2003; Koufaris and Hampton-Sosa 2004). But what are the subprocesses of trust? Can trust be subdivided into its constituent processes? Can we compare trust processes between human and virtual sales agents and then design virtual sales agents to be more trustworthy than a human sales agent? These are important questions, as any seller who can achieve trust in virtual sales agents will have a solid foundation...