Internet vs. Traditional Marketing, Is a Real War?
04.24.09
How do you get to know products and services you buy? You’ve probably never asked yourself this. Companies use different methods to show what they offer. Basically that’s marketing: “whatever you do to promote your business, including market research, advertising, publicity, sales, merchandising and distribution”.
Behind products that surround you there are a lot of strategies and tools use to promote them. On Internet there are possibilities that complement and improve traditional ways of marketing.
Both traditional and Internet marketing have the same goal: attract new customers or maintain current clients. However, there are differences between them, based on common marketing tools: the 4 Ps (or product, price, place and promotion).
Product. In traditional marketing it is tangible but in a website is just an image. Nevertheless, Internet has an advantage: the possibility to offer a wide line of products without the need for a physical space (cost saving). Even purchases are a click away.
Price. As you should know, price of anything depends on the cost of producing it, showing it and distributing it. Internet marketing promotion is cheap, so it has the possibility of saving costs, what means lower prices for customers. But traditional marketing has a chance: people could feel more secure paying in a store than through Internet.
Place. One of the strategies of positioning is to surround the client of the brand. It means creating an attractive atmosphere in terms of company’s corporate image. For traditional marketing, companies can decorate their stores even with music and nice odors. That is a challenge for Internet: a website can include music, animations, nice images and colors but the experience won’t be the same.
Promotion. This is the clearest difference. Internet is fast: ads, information and messages arrive quickly to millions of people. Traditionally, the ad could be fast (as in radio) but it endures few seconds and the public isn’t huge amount of people like on the Internet.
By the other hand is the durability: a TV commercial spends some seconds during few times a day, an ad in a newspaper is expensive and appears just one day to specific geographical area. Instead, web sites, ads, banners, e-mails, etc. have 24/7 access for people of the whole world.
Portfolios, papers, brochures, catalogs… don’t have to be printed or stored on Internet marketing like in traditional. It means costs savings.
As a last point, in spite of traditional marketing allows communication face to face with the client, Internet marketing allows direct communication with target market in a bigger area.
Conclusion. There is no war between traditional and Internet marketing. We can say that Internet is a complementary tool for traditional methods; but marketing online is faster, cheaper and reaches more people.
