One of the most significant changes in the last decade in the business environment has been caused by the development of information technologies and the internet. The internal structure and organization of companies has changed to evolve towards a digital environment influenced by internet business models and digital marketing (DM) techniques. This chapter develops a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying the key players in the business environment with respect to the new business models and digital marketing techniques applied to them, to improve the benefits they bring to the company. The results of the research identify and define the main actors of the electronic commerce (EC) ecosystem, as well as their typologies and the main techniques of DM used in this field of research. The results of the exploratory study can be used for future research in this field and to reinforce the reference bibliography in this area of research.
TopIntroduction
Different research conducted in the last decade, indicate that one of the most significant changes in the business environment has been the implementation of Digital Marketing (DM) social media marketing strategies to maximize the return on investment -Return on investment (ROI) - of these in Electronic Commerce (EC) and this fact has led many authors to talk and research about the new digital industry as the Industry 4.0. (Chaffey, 2012).
As indicated by O'Reilly (2005), one of the factors that caused this transformation process was the so-called Bubble Point Com, which together with the development of information and communication technologies, built a speculative economic current on companies of technological base or startups and business on the Internet (Cohen et al., 2000; Järvinen, and Karjaluoto, 2015).
Therefore, we can affirm, following the works of Kaushik (2009) and Chaffey (2015) that innovation, new technologies and social networks have changed the way of doing business and the business model as we understood it until the last decade of the 20th century. It is important to point out that in the 60s and 70s the emphasis would already be on the value that for companies had to identify the interests and orientations of consumers in emerging market studies. Drucker, would explain his fundamental theory of Marketing focusing on customer orientation and segmentation as the keys to Marketing: “Marketing aims to know and understand the consumer so well that the product fits perfectly to their needs” (Arch, Woodside, Milner, 1992).
Based on these ideas, Godin (1995) would synthesize Drucker's conception of Marketing in its concept of “Permission Marketing”, where Marketing would put aside aggressiveness for sale and intrusion and focus on getting the permission of consumers before proceeding with the sale process: “Consumers will only give permission to a company to communicate with them if they know what they are going to earn in return.”
This philosophy of exchange and adaptation, anticipated by Drucker and developed by Godín (1995), would be the driving force for the DM thanks to the development of the Internet (O'Reilly, 2005, Chaffey, 2012).
In addition, this vision would be the starting point to the debate raised in the mid-1980s, in which after the Bubble Point Com, the use of traditional marketing techniques in this new business environment would be criticized, leading to the assimilation and approach of new DM techniques -also known as e-Marketing- suitable for sales in new digital environments (German et al., 2013).