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eMarketing (electronic marketing) To understand and define e-marketing, we first need to define Marketing. In general, it includes all activities involved in getting goods from the producer to the consumer. The producer is responsible for the design and manufacture of goods or services. Early marketing techniques followed production and were responsible only for moving goods from the manufacturer to the point of final sale. Now, however, marketing is much more pervasive. In large corporations the marketing functions precede the manufacture of a product. They involve market research and product development, design, and testing.

Marketing concentrates primarily on the buyers, or consumers, determining their needs and desires, educating them with regard to the availability of products and to important product features, developing strategies to persuade them to buy, and, finally, enhancing their satisfaction with a purchase. Marketing management includes planning, organizing, directing, and controlling decision making regarding product lines, pricing, promotion, and servicing. In addition, the marketing department of a business firm is responsible for the physical or virtual distribution of the products, determining the channels of distribution that will be used and supervising the profitable flow of goods from the factory or production center or warehouse or inventory locale (if any).

What is different between traditional marketing and eMarketing, is that in the latter, a marketer must utilize additional channels of distribution as well as tools to communicate, acquire and keep customers. For instance, the means to acquire sales leads are somewhat more technical, such as implementing real-time online communication methods on a website.

However, at the core of it all, eMarketing, just as traditional marketing, is all about making products and/or services as readily available to potential and current customers as possible.