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Biography

Graduating in 1974 from Sheffield University with a degree in Geology, Dr David Arnott spent 12 years working for an international oil industry service company. He spent the last few years of that time in Marketing Management in their corporate HQ in California. His primary responsibilities were marketing communications and new service development. An MBA (Dean's List) from Manchester Business School (1988) was followed by a PhD (1992), also at MBS, researching aspects of positioning in service industries.

He was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Marketing and Strategic Management at Warwick Business School in March 1993. His research interests still include marketing problems in the services sector but a long standing love/hate relationship with IT has blossomed into a research focus on issues relating to the role of IT in marketing and marketing communications. He teaches on and/or manages undergraduate, MBA and executive programme courses in marketing analysis, marketing management and marketing communications. His publications include articles in the International Journal of Bank Marketing, International Journal of Services Industry Management and Journal of Analysis, Measurement and Targeting in Marketing and he has contributed (as author and editor) to books in his field. He is currently editing a reader in Marketing Communication Classics (due early 1999).

Why Use the Web to Study Marketing?

At the centre of marketing and a part of its very definition is the concept of exchange of values: the making of an offer, the comparison of offers and the acceptance of a particular offer by a consumer or customer. Until the final sale, much of the material evaluated by the consumer/customer is delivered via some form of communication (packaging, word-of-mouth, press and TV advertising, billboards, sponsorship, brochures, direct mail offers, salesforce, etc). Throughout history, businesses have always taken immediate advantage of any communications media advances to spread the good word about their products. The Web, as a new form of communication, is an extension of this.

Since the commercialisation of the Web the rapid uptake of the medium by companies and organisations offers students of marketing unprecedented and rapid, cost effective access to material that would have taken many hours of searching to locate and would been expensive to obtain. Eventually, there is no doubt, many of the current resources on the Web will become pay-per-view or accessible only via some other chargeable form but at present there is a vast range of free or cheap material available.

The Web hosts information about marketing journals and associations, consumer buying behaviour, marketing research, product development and innovation, marketing communications and electronic marketing and more. This chapter gives an introduction to each of these areas, as well as a sample marketing text and four case studies of corporate Web sites. Marketing educators must find the best way of using all available technologies and this chapter provides a starting point from which students can explore the Web to enhance their understanding of marketing.

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