How has Information & Communication Technology changed International Marketing

The advent of ICT has undermined the traditional concept of the market.

Internet, "virtually" bringing the goods where the customers are, has defeated the distances and has broken down the need for a physical place to be exposed.

Initially assimilated to electronic commerce (e-commerce), it was later revealed as much more powerful and versatile, with lots of possibilities. Among the many features, three are the most used: the ability to make purchases (e-commerce), exchange ideas (network) and the ability to draw information (accessibility-information).

These features, added to the digitization and to some already described for the web-Marketing (addressability, interactivity, memory) proved to be the most powerful facilitators for the explosion of the e-commerce.
The digitalization: the ability to have a product, or some of its benefits in digital form has been the engine of success of e-commerce.
The success of the e-commerce initially rewarded those who, aware of the potential of ICT, have focused on these, with the sale of digitized products: data, music, pictures, movies, entertainment, books, and services: ticketing, hotel reservations , brokerage real estate, financial services and insurances. Then the sale of physical goods was also affirmed. Initially perceived as the market for products with low price, then it also established branded products.
There were problems, mainly due to existing laws and regulations that were not prepared to face this new market.

In addition to the traditional categories of business:
-business to consumer (B2C) refers to a transaction between a company and a private user, is increasing in importance of:
-consumer to consumer (C2C) in relation to a transaction between users, the e-commerce is developing the :
-consumer to business (C2B) in relation to a transaction in which the private user suggests the price that the company can accept or reject the offer.

The C2B is a novelty due to competition from e-commerce to traditional commerce. In cases where a customer shows on his Smartphone the same product offered online at a lower price, some large chains of electronic products, reserve the right to accept that price.

The C2C, before the Internet, was limited only on trade in the local markets. Today, with the auction sites online purchases between individuals have passed the continental borders. The Birth of sites for car-sharing or rent houses online are revolutionizing the traditional markets and the limits to their development are mainly due to bureaucratic problems.
Before the birth of ICT this was unthinkable.
Today, all businesses have their own website, even those that use traditional sales channels. Given the relatively low cost of production for an online catalogue, many companies have tried to sell their products through e-commerce, in addition to traditional sales channels.

But not all have been successful.
This is mainly due to the poor knowledge of ICT. Facing the new challenge with the concepts of traditional sales, many companies thought it would be sufficient to transfer their online catalogues online and they also had the The marketplace gave the opportunity even to those who did not have sufficient knowledge of ICT to have a good visibility on the internet. Thus giving the opportunity also to small, medium sized businesses and even customers to address this market with a good chance.
This has created a new phenomenon.

In traditional sales, the space has a considerable cost, so it is necessary to expose only products whose sales generate adequate returns, products with low or very low returns are not profitable. In the e-commerce there is an opposite phenomenon. Low exposure Cost, high visibility, potentially global, so it is possible to sell also unique items, or products with a low number of sales that traditional stores cannot afford to keep. So the opportunity for many companies to sell / buy products exploded, something that was impossible or difficult to commercialize before. The new phenomenon so called “Long tail” was born.

“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart above, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.
Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.”