The marketing concept and strategy development for e-commerce The marketing concept with its central idea of market orientation stresses customer focus, but what emphasis can be placed on this when dealing with a new phenomenon? There was plenty of evidence in the case studies of the widespread use of customer and competitor feedback and research in general. This was made up of both feedback through sales contacts and also the use of a whole range of more formal market research methods. Indeed in the area of competitor research there was often far too much information and the problem for managers was in dealing with it all. However there was little evidence that market intelligence from customers had a significant influence in making the big strategic decisions that needed to be made to mobilise the e-commerce projects in these organisations. While undoubtedly the managers in the case study organisations would like to have a clearer vision of the future provided by customers, the reality is that they have to rely on what they already know and gut feeling. The Buildsoc technology manager sums up the situation in making strategic decisions:

Nobody knows or even has a well-founded view that will turn out to be the truth . . . the organisational impact is unknown, the ground rules are different . . . It's almost like how did gas companies react, when electricity was competitive? What is it we know about what we've been doing previously which will help us. That to me I see as the biggest challenge.

In taking this approach thinking has to be flexible, as plans may need to alter. The Interbank marketing manager warns against being too prescriptive: Within Interbank I think we have a very clear strategy, but not a very time detailed one, because you don't know what's going to happen three months down the line. Often there's the danger of being too strategic and saying right in three years time we will be doing this, this, this and this.

This challenge of the need to anticipate the future in dealing with innovation is not really encompassed in the market orientation models. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) acknowledge that intelligence generation involves anticipating customers' future needs, but do not develop this thought. Indeed in a later paper Jaworski and Kohli (1996) argue that innovation is an outcome of market orientation. The relationship between market orientation and innovation is not clear. On the one hand there is an argument (Hayes and Abernathy, 1980) that a market-oriented focus could be detrimental to innovation, based on the idea that market orientation seduces the business to being narrowly interested in short-term customer needs. On the other hand it is proposed that models of market orientation should focus more on innovation (Hurley and Hult, 1998). They suggest that, if market orientation requires the adoption of new behaviours (innovation), the construct of innovation should be included in the existing models of market orientation. Other studies of market orientation (Narver and Slater, 1990; Slater and Narver, 1994) took the position that the existence of a customer and competitor orientation in creating customer value will be sufficient to give a business a competitive advantage in all circumstances. Latterly Slater and Narver (1998) seem to have modified this view by adding that a market-oriented organisation develops long-term thinking and tries to satisfy latent customer needs. However the mechanics of market sensing in this way still seems to be very vague and it is not clear how it fits into the original market orientation models. Slater and Narver (1999) admit that the understanding of market orientation continues to evolve and much is still unknown.

The experience of the managers in the case studies appears to be that although an enormous amount of research and intelligence was gathered and used within the companies it was of only limited applicability in developing strategy. This is because of uncertainty about the future and the difficulty in researching theoretical propositions with customers.

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INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we will examine our research methodology. First we will indicate the objection of research. We used some methods to collect this information. We interviewed with the executive managers of the company that we chose to examine. Also we used Internet to get information about our product and Google.


THE OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

Our goals to make this research were to get information about the company we chose to examine. We made a deep interview with xxxx and xxxx and collected information. We used Internet to collect information about the company.


THE METHODS

We used several methods while doing this research. Firstly, we searched from the internet and than we made some interviews with a few managers. We also used some magazines about Google in this research.


Interviews

Firstly, we talked to xxxx who is head of the company. We asked him some questions about getting job in Google, the characteristics of Google employees, social guarantee of workers, etc. and he answered them.
Finally, we had a deep interview with xxxx who is a marketing manager in Google. Our interview continued at about 45 minutes. We asked him many questions about their market share, competitors, target market, promotion ways, and strategies to keep customers loyal, their problems and solutions. We were well-informed after that interview.

INTERNET

We have searched lots of sites to collect information about Google. The web site is www.google.com. We have also searched journals about marketing, management, corporation, etc. in the web sites www.ege.edu.tr

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we examined the methods that we used to collect information. As a result of this research, we almost collected all the information we need. We had some interviews and learned to talk with an executive manager in a formal way. We think this will help us in our business life too much.

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For a market-oriented organisation it is not enough to be focused on customers and competitors; it is necessary to be responsive to changes in the market (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). In a large organisation this involves a high degree of interfunctional coordination (Narver and Slater, 1990). Small focused teams have been instrumental in forcing through change in both Buildsoc and Interbank. The Buildsoc marketing manager recognises the benefit of smaller group decision-making to short cut bureaucratic processes: I think a lot of people are warming to the idea that the business should be making the decisions in smaller groups and those smaller groups reporting their decisions to other groups, not necessarily inviting other groups to comment. There's got to be a corporate ownership and a greater level of trust in people's decision making . . . so I think the e-development has been a great stimuli to say do we really have to make decisions this slow and have committee meetings all over the place?

This is also recognised by the Buildsoc retail operations manager who suggests: The answer might be to make yourself small in the way you operate, but within a big context. That sounds a bit odd, but if you look at the companies that seem to be able to produce things very quickly [they] are very small companies. Then they get big and that slows them down. It's a question of acting small but being big, if that makes sense.

The need to see across the organisational strands and also focus on the shortest timeline for implementation is challenging and is not something that traditional management training has prepared people for (Smith, 1998). It requires seeing the detail for each area and type of person involved, while also keeping the big picture in mind. This cannot be hierarchical (Miles et al., 2000) and traditional rules do not always apply. In Buildsoc and Interbank small teams with the heavyweight support of their respective chief executive were seen to be the best way of overcoming some of the challenges in getting change projects underway. However this was not the end of the story. Getting a change initiative underway is only the start, it then needs to be fully integrated within the organisation.

In order to take advantage of the benefits of e-commerce Porter (2001) stresses the imperative for companies to develop tailored value chains to build up defensible competitive advantage. This involves a high degree of cross-activity integration, for instance sales activities linked with order processing. There is an appreciation from the Insco marketing manager that the response to e-commerce should be integrated: It's not just marketing, it's not just IT, it's product development, it's the whole business and I think people aren't aware of that enough across the business to be thinking in those terms.

Despite the initial success of getting the e-commerce projects off the ground, in some of the case studies, there were very real challenges identified in developing and sustaining an integrated and coordinated cross-functional approach to long-term implementation, where it was taking place within the existing organisation. In the Interbank case study the creation of the separate operation seems to have overcome some of these by sidestepping the issue. The point is that, for an existing company doing business on the Internet, a range of organisational issues arise requiring major adjustments to the organisational infrastructure: culture, people and structures (Boddy and Boonstra, 2000). But changes to mental models and norms (Kondra and Hinings 1998) can be psychologically threatening (Ashkenas, 2000). Therefore it needs to be recognised that the strategic Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252±260 decision to develop an innovation will have massive organisational implications (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The size of the challenge is neatly summed up by the Insco e-commerce manager: The company started in [date] ± 150 years odd of doing things by paper, it is hard to move the whole organisation and there are few visionaries around that realise that.

The issue of implementation of strategy is recognised in the major market orientation models, however it can be argued that this element is explained less than comprehensively. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) have less to say on responsiveness than intelligence generation or dissemination, but it is at the core of their model. Responsiveness is the action taken in response to market trends, involving virtually all departments in the organisation. However Jaworski and Kohli (1993) acknowledge that their analysis does not shed much light on the change process. In the alternative model of Narver and Slater (1990) the mechanics of responding to change in an integrated manner is described as interfunctional coordination. To accomplish this effectively companies need to develop horizontal structures and manage projects through small multi-functional teams (Slater and Narver, 1994), but they also need to become learning organisations (Slater and Narver, 1995). They agree with Day (1994) that superior ability to learn is critical because of the acceleration of technological change and the need to development distinct competencies to achieve competitive advantage. However they accept that there is no widely accepted theory of what comprises the culture and climate of a learning organisation.