Discussion Questions Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 23

Discussion Questions - Essay Example s still a big field for most business people and academics to be concerned with it, especially in todays connected and digital world, enhanced by advanced information and communications technologies like the cell phone and the Internet. These inventions in improved communications has also presented a new set of challenges for marketing professionals because of the rapidity of these changes and with it, the speed by which information travels in the World Wide Web by way of dissemination. The influence of the Internet today reaches far and wide; it also influences daily lives in many ways because it has become ubiquitous as more people get connected on-line with the rise or growth in the Internet penetration. The sheer omnipresence of the Internet has presented new opportunities and problems for marketeers as they struggle to connect with their consumers in a digital world. An example of this is the rise of so-called on-line communities put up by the firms to help them connect with buyers but has presented some difficulties for them in most instances, because of their failure to recognize the four pillars of a successful hyper-sociality in tribalization efforts (Moran & Gossieaux, 2010, p. 238) and the primary reason for shutting these sites down. Many big firms, especially global enterprises, have resorted to use of a fancy integrated marketing communications (IMC) but the practice also has its drawbacks. In particular, not many people know or understand what it actually means, because it is still an emerging discipline. It is still in infancy and there is a dearth of literature on the subject (Kitchen, Kim & Schultz, 2008, p. 532) such that what happened is that practice has instead gone ahead of the theories on IMC. The way to counter this seeming ignorance is that proposed by using a consumer-centric perspective that combines both IMC and relationship marketing to sustain loyalty (Finne & Gronroos, 2009, p. 180) among consumers of the company which transcends