The marketing perspective

Marketing campaigns are very useful promotion methods for a company. It is indeed important for companies to develop clear measures for marketing campaigns. There are several reasons: It is useful for marketing managers to get insights of the effectiveness of campaigns through measurement. It is clear whether the campaigns are successful or not. Managers can compare the campaigns with each other easily by measuring effectiveness, and find out the marketing activities that have the greatest revenue impact. Return on investment (ROI) is such a useful factor (Stewart 2006).

It is useful for marketing managers to adjust the plans of the campaigns. If a campaign does not achieve the expected goals, managers can find out the reasons and improve the performance, or adjust the marketing plans to favour the successful campaigns. It is useful for the company to respond to the changes of the market environment and customer behavior. For example, measuring the communication impact of the campaigns is helpful to determine the marketing channels. Online channels become better than offline channels. Companies can change their strategies and plans according to the results of measurement.

It is useful for the company to save money. A proposed campaign should be tested in one or a few cities first and its impact evaluated before rolling it out nationally (Kotler 2003). It can avoid the big losses of going national. It also can help managers to arrange the marketing spend effectively. Obviously, developing clear measures is really the important part of campaign management. It helps the campaigns go on successfully. ompared with traditional commerce, eCommerce builds a virtual business environment. In this environment, companies try to convince customers to make a deal with them.

The company with appeal for customers should be trustworthy, too. Trust here is expressing a value. It is applied to an expression such as a statement, a sentence-token (e. g. a photograph or drawing instead of a sentence), a sentence-type (e. g. a comment), a proposition, a fact, a belief or opinion. And a true proposition represents the truth value (Baird 2006). Therefore the statement about use of recycled packaging as the true proposition has the truth value. The company has some motives for putting the statement about use of recycled packaging on its web site.

The statement shows the attitude of the company to the environment protection. This may build up a good reputation for the company. This will appeal to customers with environment protection awareness. It is the ethics of respect to their favour. Besides, it may be the company’s duty in some regions in the world. Packaging is one of the quality criterions. The recycled packaging highlights this aspect of the product quality. In some regions, this criterion is necessary. If there is no this kind of statement, people in that regions may not consider to make a deal with the company. In the context of eCommerce, it may affect the global business.

Ethics describes morals, justifies morals, and considers why a particular behaviour may take place (Baird 2006). It encompasses a broad range of issues that may or may not be covered by laws and regulations. Companies should consider these issues carefully when put the statement on web site. Recall the case study about the cardboard box manufacturer. Why might they be unconcerned about security on their current systems? In eCommerce, companies do businesses and transfer information through Internet. In order to protect their businesses, the security of the systems becomes more and more important for companies.

But the cardboard box manufacturer in the case is unconcerned about security on their current systems. It is reasonable. Firstly, the cardboard box manufacturer is a company only has two PCs. There won’t be many security problems of two PCs. The architecture is too simple in the company. There is no need to build complicated Intranet and large database, not many operators to use the computers. Therefore, it is easy to make sure the integrity of data, authentication, and access control. And the valuable information stored in the two PCs is not much. It can be easily recovered.

The main threats of the systems may be the virus or piratic software and CDs. The anti-virus software is essential and enough. Besides, regular updating the systems should be ignored. Systems can be asked to do it automatically. Actually, the company may not need to worry about the five vulnerabilities – integrity, identity authentication, access control, confidentiality, and non-repudiation (Gould 2006) in their company. Secondly, the staff in the company has little or even no IT knowledge. They may not be aware the security problems in their systems, or do not have the ability to protect them.

It is hard for the company to form a security policy and maintain their system. Last, the cost of various security measures is high. It concerns security ROI. The company may lose some money because of non-security. But the loss may still less than the expenditure of security solutions. For example, in order to ensure the confidentiality of systems, they need to pay for some eCommerce applications for cryptography and encryption, like VPN. They are very expensive. The security solution must be suitable to the actual conditions. The requirements of security are different. The cardboard manufacturer is the case.