Motivations To Use Interactive Technologies In Marketing: A Study In Indian Service Businesses | Sanjaya S. Gaur & K. Abdul Waheed

Interactive technology helps marketers to inexpensively engage consumers in one-to-one relationships fueled by two-way conversations via mouse clicks on a computer,touch-tone buttons on a telephone or surveys completed at a kiosk. Several organisations especially in services businesses are increasingly strengthening their marketing function by effectively interacting with their customers with the help of sophisticated interactive technologies in an integrated manner. Enough research in the usage or adoption of electronic data interchange (EDI) can be found both in information systems and marketing literature. A careful review of available literature further shows that the usage or adoption of Internet and e-mail has been studied in detail by various researchers across the world. Therefore, it appears that different interactive technologies have been studied individually by different researchers. We did not come across any study making an attempt to understand the motivation for usage of all adopted interactive technologies together in an organisation for the purpose of marketing activities in particular. This gap is wider when one tries to find out studies related to interactive technologies and their usage or adoption especially for marketing activities in a developing country like India. This paper attempts to understand the factors influencing the usage of interactive technologies in services businesses with the intention to derive implications for the development of interactive technologies to suit its intended users.