Introduction

The Marketing Tool Kit is experiencing tremendous amounts of innovation today. The boom in direct and database marketing, the dawning of electronic commerce, new ways to automate sales force management, and the sudden blossoming of the World Wide Web all suggest that the discipline is under pressure to reshape(John Deighton).

Business discountinuities like deregulation, globalization, technological convergence, and the rapid evolution of the Internet have blurred the roles that companies play with their customers and redefined the way value is created and delivered. C.K.Prahalad in his landmark article “Co opting customer competence” demonstrated the need to regard the customer as co producers and competitors in value creation and extraction. Technology is affecting marketing by enhancing speed, customization, and individuation. The internet has enabled customer interactivity, low cost product and service delivery and experiential customer marketing. Future technological advances like the web 2.0, consumer electronic devices like the handheld PCs, cell phones, and media platforms have the potential to disrupt the current value-chains and enable new ways of creating and delivering value.

Objectives

Some of the challenges facing marketers today and which need to be tackled are: How do we innovate better and faster in products and services? How do we ride the waves of disruptive technologies: How do we manage the diffusion of innovations once we have created them? How do we “cross the chasm” from early adopters to early majority? How do we leverage the internet and other digital platforms? How do we link marketing performance with enterprise performance? The inaugural conference on Technology and Innovation in Marketing aims to stimulate thinking and exchange of ideas and practices on the theme of the conference. A major objective of the conference is to provide a platform for researchers and academicians to present their empirical findings and working papers to specialists and interact with professionals in similar research areas to enhance the process of research and academic output.