Welcome to Coventry University

E-Marketing impacts all aspects of marketing from strategy and planning through the marketing mix, marketing communications, buyer behaviour to marketing research. As the example, Coventry University is taking the benefits and risks in using E-Marketing. In the web site of Coventry University (Welcome to Coventry University 2009), it takes into account how customers process information. Good e-marketing are aware of how the message are processed by the consumer and step by step (Smith 2005). In the first step is exposure. It is straightforward and the content is presented long enough in CU web site. It is very convenient for the customers that they can click on different aspects they interested in at the front page of CU web site. For example, the courses of the university, news and events of Coventry city, the view and faculties of the University and the city, and the business related to the University and the city, etc. customers can also link to accommodation, careers, library and other information by using the quick links option. The second step is attention. Flash has been used and made the web site look dynamic. In addition, main information has been picking out as mentioned before. Subtitles will be pop out when the mouse move to the area. The text size, blue colour and the pictures also help to gain attention for the key information. The last step is retention, distinctive site as CU will be retained in the audience mind. Customers can find that it is friendly use of the web site. Not only word information can be found on the website, customers can also click the CUTV at the front page to have video information about the University.

Available resources

Internet resources have become a part of the services and collections offered by academic libraries (Weber 1999). In the Coventry university web site, there are many available resources provided for internal visitors. Electronic resources are accessible through the library portal which is included Library catalogue, database, electronic journals and websites. The searching for the available resources is provided in a cross search option on the university web page. For example, students can fine for an individual resources by selecting the find resource option from the top of the main screen and typing title or name of the resource they are looking for. Moreover, there are many key business databases such as Academic Search Premier, Emerald, Mintel, Econlist and so on which are available for business student to search information for doing their assignment or research. In addition, these available resources can be accessed off-campus through ATHENS by using the normal user name and password created for staff and students registered at Coventry University.

To Make CU website more useful and forward in the future

By improving booking sport online, this would be another thing that university should make it because when student would like to book, they have to go to sport centre directly and sometime could not booking due to it already finish.  If university make it in online, students don't have to waste their time to go to sport centre but could know the available time on the internet and booking.  Some people might think about the disadvantage of booking online because if someone book everyday and didn't show up, how should we solve the problem. The answer is quiet easily by paying the fines for person who doesn't come to play.

Not only booking sport online should be create, but also the link font should be bigger and make it more noticeable because first time when i come to visit the webpage i couldn't find the CU portal. CU portal is the important link that many students use to go through CU online or e-library, therefore this should be change the position by put it to the top of right corner for showing this link is an important link.  With the strategy of viral marketing it should make university more attract from international student and UK student because they could know the information not only in the CU website but also in the social network like Facebook or  Youtube.  

Unable to display Quick Links.
**The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.** Click here to display your 'My Modules' page.

Another thing that University should solve it is the display quick links because every time when i would like to visit the cuonline it could not go directly through the webpage and i have to click it again. Since i first came on july, until now this problem still didn't solve.  However, if university make a questionnaire about the webpage and let student do the questionnaire to get the feedback on the online or paper to collect the data and know what student want and needs to make them satisfaction.  This should make CU website move forward and in the future it might have something more to improve for the e-marketing.

References

Smith, P., Chaffey, D (2005) eMarketing eXcellence Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.

Welcome to Coventry University (2009) [Online] Available from http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/ [31 March 2009]

Weber, M. B. (1999) ‘Factors to be considered in the selection and cataloguing of Internet resources.’ Journal of Library Hi Tech 17, (3) 298-303

No Trust, No Sales

The Internet is an open, global, diverse and constantly changing market channel. Online customers do not know whether their personal information will be exposed to the public or not. Chakraborty (2007) stated that trust is primarily an important issue in building and maintaining customer relationship on the web. No business transaction can be performed without trust.
Internet-based company are facing greater market competition in the 21st century. What traders can do to win the competition is to achieve a higher degree of trust and trustworthiness. By trust, Bolton et al (2008) pointed that, it is an individual’s willingness to commit to do something where the cooperation of other people is crucial to the outcome. Trustworthiness involves the individual’s capacity to deliver to others, as they expect, and in the process, creates value for the group as a whole.
Moreover, online trust has been viewed as a key differentiator that determines the success or failure of many companies conducting their business over the Internet. A website which is trusted can provide consumers with a secure and private online shopping experience. (Lauer and Deng 2007)
According to Lauer and Deng (2007), information privacy policy is believed to enhance online trust. On one hand, privacy has a strong influence n whether an individual trusts an e-commerce business. This can influence an individual’s behavioural intentions to purchase from or visit the website again, whether he or she will have positive things to say about the business, and whether he or she would recommend this website to others. Without an organizational policy governing fair use of personal information, companies face the risk that information used inappropriately by a single employee or by a single department can have negative consequences for the entire company. Conversely, using personal information fairly throughout the company can provide a source if competitive advantage by promoting flows of customers data over time that in today’s competitive global economy, are critical in support of all activities in a firm’s value chain. Companies choose to formalize their privacy conduct based o the code of fair information practices. Whenever a customer’s private information is collected, the company provides mechanisms for the customer to find out what information is in a record and how it is used. If any information obtained for one purpose will be used or made available for other purpose, the company must receive the customer’s consent. These privacy practices should help create a perception that the company adheres to a set of principles acceptable to the customer.

The distinction between trust and trustworthiness has wide-ranging consequences. Most of the arguments about trust in the contemporary literature are misplaced or simple wrong because they confuse trust with trustworthiness. For example, many scholars claim that trust is declining in our societies and more trust is better than less trust in a society. But that is trustworthiness, and not trust, which is needed in a well-functioning society. Distrust might be a rational strategy if you deal with unreliable, i.e. untrustworthy partners.
According to prior literature, trustworthiness is defined as the perception of confidence in the electronic marketer's reliability and integrity. More definitions can be describe in example as Trust is a cognitive act where someone trusts another person to do something Trustworthiness is the moral quality of someone with whom anther person interacts about doing something.

Eastlick et al. (2006) state that, trust is an essential prerequisite for electronic customer relationship building. Trust can be separated into two basic types, (Salo and Karjaluoto, 2007) namely direct trust and third-party trust. Direct trust is a trust relationship developed by the two parties themselves. Third-party trust is a trust that develops between two parties who might not know each other from before but are willing to trust each other on account of the contribution of a reliable third party. Especially in the online world, trust plays a very common important role during surfing on the internet as personal information may be needed to be exchanged beyond that required to complete a traditional transaction. Under these circumstances, it seems likely that removing the linear effects of trustworthiness would result in the absence of relationship between purchase intentions and consumer readiness to give personal information. In reality, perceptions of trustworthiness may be essential when initiating a transaction with an electronic-only marketer since without trust, no private information will be given, and no sale will be initiated.

Advice to Football club website

One of the most important factors that can make the website to be more trustful is the personal privacy security. The website’s owner should concern about the protection of consumer to ensure that they can trust and avoid unsafe when surfing the website. Krunic and Dimitrijevic suggested that regarding to support the consumer privacy; companies should put the privacy policy on their website. Also, the context of policy should be clear and easy to understand (2008). According to the internet has become popular in many kinds of business, Also the internet technology has changed rapidly. Many firms are looking for the new way to communicate and engage with their consumers. In particular, Chelsea football club, they have renovated the website by placing more content and distributed it into social networks (Anon 2008). As a result, website tends to encourage internet user to be participated and engaged with them. Consequently, users need to give their personal information by registration. Therefore, to ensure the security of consumer personal information, the websites should have a firm privacy policy to push the trustworthiness for consumers.

Reference

Anon. (2008) 'Chelsea Fc Uses Web to Drive Interaction.' New Media Age 3-3

Bolton, G., Loebecke, C., and Ockenfels, A. (2008) ‘Does Competition Promote Trust and Trustworthiness in Online Trading? An Experimental Study.’ Journal of Management Information Systems 25, (2) 145-169

Chakraborty, C. and Chakraborty, D. (2007) ‘Fuzzy rule base for consumer trustworthiness in Internet Marketing: An interactive fuzzy rule classification approach.’ Intelligent Data Analysis 11, (4) 339-353

Eastlick, M.A., Lotz, S.L. and Warrington, P. (2006), “Understanding online B-to-C relationships:an integrated model of privacy concerns, trust, and commitment”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 59 No. 8, pp. 877-86.

Harridge-March,S. (2006) “can the building of trust overcome consumer perceived risk online?” Marketing Intelligence & Planning Journal, Vol 24, 7 pp.746-761

Jari Salo and Heikki Karjaluoto(2007) “A conceptual model of trust in the online environment” Online Information Review, Vol. 31 Issue: 5

Krunic, T. and Ruzic- Dimitrijevic, L. (2008) 'Online Privacy Analysis and Hints for Its Improvement.' Issues in Informing Science & Information Technology 5, 177-196

Lauer, T. W., and Deng, X. (2007) ‘Building online trust through privacy practices.’ International Journal of Information Security 6, (5) 323-331

Online Communities

‘The rise of virtual communities in online networks has set in monitor an unpretended shift from vendors of good and services to the customers who buy them. Vendors who understand this tranfer of power and choose to capitalize on it by organization virtual communities will be richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns.’
(Smith and Chaffey 2003)
Nowadays, it seems that online communities are the biggest communities in the world. By continually reducing the distance between people and the information they need, the Internet makes that information cheaper for marketers to send to recipients. This is a good opportunity for the organization to get closer to customers. Games online look like to be the big communities because many people around the world can connect and chat to each other easily. In this case, organization could choose the advertising their good and service in the game online. Therefore, we would like to talk about why game online is important to e-marketing. Game online can divided into many type such as RPG, Action, Sport and so on.
The world of online gaming
Specifically, the social activities of those who play the Internet game might not seem of central importance to information professionals. However, their activities of online gamers raise many points that bear on the future of marketing channel. The culture of online gaming ranges from in-game actions (chat, “guild” formation) and other online activities, i.e. creating/using other websites.
However, we will focus on Browser based and Video game online. For the game, Travian is a browser game. What do I mean the browser game? The browser game is a game that you use with the Internet explorer or firefox, you just connect to the Internet without download the program into you computer just login and play in website. You could go and see the website: www.travian.com. There is also another game similar to Travian called ‘Gladiatus’ www.gladiatus.com.
Online game shows the way promotional tools can be put to work on the Internet. The reason that Browser game is important to the marketing is the sponsor of the website could put some advertising before and after Internet user play the game. Also customer could notice the advert and might remember it. By creating the communities the organization should know their market place first. Therefore, in this Browser game field, it seems to be that computer and Internet advertising should be mixed and matched in the website.
“The fascination with games has advertisers salivating. So many brands are looking to developers and content portals to help them create new ways in which to advertise (Dan 2008)”. That is to say, many advertisers have found the advantages of online gaming in terms of product recognition and loyalty among gamers toward the brand. Recently, The video game online have a huge number of registered members, for example, in china, which has 147 million online gamers especially for the multi-player role-playing games such as Meng Huan Xi You, Zheng Tu and World of Warcraft. This kind of game seems to be the other world that the players can create their own character and be participated in an online community. The other marketing opportunity for pushing their product into the game is creating company’s real product as the item that player may use or buy in the game to modify their own character such as clothes, accessories and so on. In addition, if they make the product to be a high value, it could desire gamers to buy their product and also it can make a positive image and the brand loyalty.
It maybe work that put the real product into the virtual world (AOL Small Business 2006). The products could be showed in the online game. For example, there are lots of missions in World of Warcraft. Players will get the award that after they complete the mission. Real products could be one of the awards in the online game. If players use Coke for restoring their health point (HP) in the online game such as World of Warcraft, it could be one of the significant successes in the marketing of Coke Cola. It seems that products could get the benefit in cooperating with online game.

Reference:
Gao, Y. (2004) ‘Appeal of online computer games: a user perspective.’ The Electronic Library [online] vol. 22, (1)74-78. Available from < jsessionid="5EEEA3D9147231AEB69555BA1D8A7733?contentType="Article&contentId="862044"> [19 March 2009]
Castronova, E. (2006) ‘A cost-benefit analysis of real-money trade in the products of synthetic economies.’ Emerald Group Publishing Limited [online] vol.8,(6)51-68. Available from [19 March 2009]
Smith, PR., and Chaffey, D. (2004) eMarketing eXcellence: the heart of eBusiness . Oxford:Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann.
Mintz, D. (2008) 'The Addictive Nature of Online Games and Breaking the Rules.' Revolution (14605953) 13-13
AOL Small Business (2006) Sell Virtual Products in Online Games
[online] available from [19 March 2009]

Mobile Internet growing in popularity

As we knew, PC has become necessary equipment for all aspect of human living. Its technology had also been developing all the time. Recently, to compare with mobile phone, the evolution of communication on PC system has been developed. For example, Skype, it is software that people can make a telephone call on the internet. Moreover, there are some featured services such as instant message, sending a file, video conference. It is free of charge and in my case; it is good for international student to make a call home. For this reason, in the future, people would probably choose PC to communicate rather than mobile phone. However, mobile seems to become the important part to our daily life because nowadays mobile have many function to connect with the internet and so on.

According to report from www.telegraph.co.uk,Take-up of the mobile web is growing eight times fast than internet use on computers. Younger web users are also more likely to surf the net on their mobile phones than their computers, with a quarter of all mobile internet users aged between 15 and 24, compared to just 16 per cent of PC web users.

The most outstanding advantage for mobile is freedom. All trends agree that PC, wireless connection, and broadband Internet can be combined in a single mobile phone. Internet connectivity from mobile gives total mobility to consumers. This allows people to transfer files without having to be wired at home. Common internet services like Web surfing, e-mail, Intranet access, and many more can be done with faster speed as compared to dial-up. At the moment, user could actually connect your own mobile phone and use it just the way how a high speed internet connection works, however, not as fast as the land based high speed. While operator certainly still have a role to play by improve and provide the move for internet mobile.

Bring the Internet into your living room

Do you think your computer screen is too small to watch movie? Do you think YouTube-size clips do not display well on an HDTV? Though Internet video has come a long way in both picture and content quality, it is still mostly in the form of short, grainy. But with the Internet-TV, all the problems will be solved. Microsoft TV (IPTV), Msn TV and Apple TV are working on just that. With the new technology, customers can send and receive e-mail, download movie, surfing Internet through their TV set (Porges 2007). Internet-TV could gives you access to an easy-to-navigate world of entertainment such as rent HD movies, buy HD TV shows, watch your favourite channels and listen to your music. It is a low-cost alternative to a traditional computer connection to the Internet

Reference
Porges, S. (2007) ‘TheFuture of Web TV.’ PC Manazine 26, (24) 19-19

Watch the Apple TV 2 Intro, please chlick the link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY-qBRdqaDk

The Coventry Student Experience

Viral Marketing and advertising

viral marketing and viral marketing refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable. take this video as the sample.



Even if the viral marketing and viral advertising could increase in brand awareness and achieve the marketing objectives but if consumers did not like the advertising it could be worst because company could not control the word-for-mouth. Moreover, WOM is the important communication tools if consumer like our product they would like to told their friend, so it would be an advantage to the company. However, if consumer did not like our product, it would be a disadvantage to the company and company could not control the message that consumer talk to consumer.