Electronic Misnomers

I really hate the phrases "electronic marketing", "electronic business", "electronic commerce", or its derivative, "e-commerce". The word electronic focuses on hardware, which, at this point at least, tends to be electronic. This obscures the fact that the raw material of Internet business is software. Companies do not use electronics to create so called "electronic services", they use software to do so.

The defining characteristic of software is, of course, its softness. In other words, the most useful thing about software is its sheer arbitrariness. One can do anything one wants to do with it. This utter flexibility is itself quite challenging. At the design end, complexity forces programmers to build code so that it functions well within the Internet software ecology. At the user end, complexity impacts the consumer also, since that customer needs some sort of mental model or metaphor to understand how the e-service functions.

Software is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the consumer's environment. More and more, marketing is becoming a process of managing software. Marketers need to think about its design or acquisition, adoption, assimilation and implementation, all in way that furthers the firm's marketing goals.

Marketing departments need to absorb the fact that the physical, psychological, social and commercial worlds are increasingly constructed with software. It is not an e-world, it's an s-world.

Related Paper: Hofacker, Charles F., Ronald E. Goldsmith, Eileen Bridges and Esther Swilley (2007), "E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda," Journal of Value Chain Management.