Information Technology (IT) in Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Information Technology (IT) in Marketing - Essay Example Technology plays an important role in the business environment because it accelerates the pace of communication, transportation, and manufacturing and also assists in formulating major marketing strategies. IT and communication has been identified as the macro factors in the new business trends. The way computers receive and store data is a matter of astonishment in the field of communication. Path breaking applications brought in by companies such as BlackBerry, Apple, etc is taking international marketing to a new level (University of Leicester, 2010, p. 64-65). This study aims at evaluating the affect of technological advancement in the international marketing. The intention is also to discuss the effect of information technology (IT) on creating business opportunities globally and maintaining healthy relationship with the customers around the world. Keeping in mind the aim of the study, the investigation would initiate with an overview on the significance of IT in marketing, whic h would further discuss the aspects of IT advancement and its effect on global business environment. ... 398). Advancement in technology has provided the companies with the capability to collect enormous quantity of information related to the recent and potential market. In order to recognize the marketplace and respond accordingly to the demands, companies nowadays acquire technological linkages which will internally link the operations of the company. A study done in the year 1995 by Ernst & Young revealed that about the 327 firms that were surveyed, about 72 percent of them were already using IT based framework to manage their finance department, 64 percent to manage logistics department, and 49 percent for marketing segment. These companies only expected that the projected usage of IT in the finance department would increase to 81 percent, logistics to 79 percent and marketing to 78 percent in a span of five years. Similar trend were also seen within the business environment of UK (Wierenga, and Bruggen, 2000, p. 5-7). Nowadays IT links the marketing and functional equivalents, so a s to offer accessibility to market information. By streamlining the suppliers, customers, and functional department through a single IT network, huge benefits can be derived. This would have been quite complex if IT framework did not existed. The major factor in the shifting marketing background is the emergence of IT based communication network. With the advancement of IT, the demands of the customer are also increasing because they are already receiving augmented products. The emergence of internet and diverse assortment of online tools are accessible by the organization to reach out to the target audiences (Lamb, Hair, Jr., and McDaniel, 2007, p. 19-20). A major