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Marketing is the process by which goods are sold and purchased. The aim of marketing is to acquire, retain, and satisfy customers. Modern marketing has evolved into a complex and diverse field. In today’s extremely competitive business environment businesses are searching for ways to improve profitability and to formula for success becomes more difficult. One particular thing has greatly aided companies in their quests to accomplish these goals and that is the computer. Some of the roles computers play in these changing marketing trends is as follows.
One role of computers in marketing is inventory control. Computers are now used to keep records of inventory. Inventory keeping allows Inventory control systems maintain information about activities within firms that ensure the delivery of products to customers. The subsystems that perform these functions include sales, manufacturing, warehousing, ordering, and receiving. Software like Simple Inventory, Microsoft Access, Mess Less Inventory Management System and Jump Box facilitate automated inventory management.
It makes it easy to retrieve, save and change stocks, customer details, market niches, and sales. Secondly, computers are used in product and market analysis. Systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of data about issues relating to marketing products and services are currently done using computers. The goal of this is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior quickly. Computers are able to analyze a greater sample of market niches and make forecasting more precise than the previous ways of getting the study done.
Chime (1990) defined it by saying that “Computers are looked upon as obedient servants who are ever ready to free man from tedious procedures and produce results as compared with human computing time”. Bobolink (1995), defined computer as a machine that is capable of accepting input data, store and process the data based on instructions given by the computer user and in this way produce expected results, generally called output. World Net describes an information system (I.
S) as “a system consisting of the network of all communication channels used within an organization, and includes software and hardware”. It may also be defined as “a system that collects and processes data (information) and provides it to mangers at all levels that use it for decision making, planning, program implementation and control. Marketing deals with customers more than any other business function, where building customer relationship based on customer value and satisfaction is the heart of modern marketing (Armstrong and Kettle, 2010).
Marketing is defined as -??the process of creating, distributing, promoting, and selling the goods, services, and ideas to facilitate satisfying exchange relationship with customers in a dynamic environment] (Pride And Farrell, 2003). According to Kettle and Keller (2009), financial success depend on marketing ability, since finance operations, accounting and other functions will not really matter if here is no demand for the company’s products and services. Moreover, the competition is increasing day by day in the very fast growing global marketing, and marketing is affected by internal and external environment forces (Tate and Alas, 2009).
Due to those changes, marketing management is a necessity which is defined as the art and science of choosing target market, winning customer loyalty, and attracting new customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value (Kettle and Keller, 2012). Marketing managers have to know what to sell, when to sell and how to sell the goods and services and in-order to do so, the managers have to get certain information to be able to make the right marketing decision.
The value of information increases since it becomes one of the most marketing managers have to make marketing decisions such as service to provide, price of the service, promoting the service and the place to sell the service (McLeod and Shell, 2001). This means that the firms need a systematic organization and development of Marketing Information Systems (CBS) which can effectively collect, process and diffuse the necessary information available both to the internal and external levels (Panegyrics, 2006).
Computer Based marketing have been seen as a support system for the firms’ marketing management with its decision making process; in addition, to the management perspective, marketing information system can be an essential tool for the entire market organization. Kettle and Keller (2012), defines the Marketing Information Systems as -??an interacting structure of people, equipment and procedures to gather sort, analyze, evaluate and distribute, timely and accurate information for use by marketing decision makers to improve their marketing planning, implementation, and control”.
An efficient Computer Based racketing (or) Marketing Information System captures the status of and the relevant changes in the marketplace while simultaneously ridding the reporting environment of redundant informational(O’Brien et al, 1995). Computers have a great impact on society in the field of advertising. Many companies prefer to advertise on the Internet than to use other electronic devices like television, radios mobiles and many other electronic devices.
This extensive and persuasive advertising of companies and their products on the computer Internet has a great impact on widening of the market that greatly leads to development of the advertising companies. Another reason why the advent of computers has made greater impact on society is that, it can store huge amounts of data in very small space and stored information is also very easy to organize, manipulate and retrieve as compared to other electronic devices and which eases commerce.
Compared to other electronic devices computers are greatly preferred for their speed; they are extremely fast. They may carry out millions of calculations per second, which eases the work of accountants and auditors. This has stimulated the business environment today. Computers are known to be so accurate that they hardly make any mistakes if correctly used. In fact they are capable of detecting and correcting any mistakes made, hence if a computer is given the right information it will always produce the right output. This introduces the computer jargon garbage in garbage out.
It is for this reason therefore that accountants prefer to use a computer compared to any other electronic device, hence its greater impact on society. Due to wide spread of computer technology, there has been increased efficiency in communication to business sectors for example in banks which connects with its other branches using computer technology. This reduces costs of movement and saves time. . 1. 1 Benefits and Importance of Computer Based marketing One of the very first benefits that a company derives from the use of IT-based Marketing is improvements in the reporting system.