Leveraging marketing performance through information technology use

The effect of Information Technology (IT) on marketing processes has been widely acknowledged in the last two decades (Leverick et al 1998). Technological development has reached most areas of marketing. Popular business press first promulgated the limitless rise of business performance enhanced by IT, then, after the bursting of the dot-com bubble (Szabó 2002) technology was completely disgraced. IT development and its effects on business activities have been in the forefront of scientific thinking in the last two-three decades (Castells 2005, Glazer 1991, Salo et al 2005). According to Brady et al (2002) IT brings elementary changes in marketing. What’s more, not only the marketing activities, the used methods or processes could change. Technical competencies will have a central role in the marketing practice (Webster 1992), since the ability to handle technology will become one of the success factors of marketing professionals. Companies using IT solutions have to analyze which is greater: the benefits of IT usage and automation, or the advantages of personal interactions and direct customer relationships (De Wulf et al 2001, Fellenz–Brady 2006, Rebolledo et al 2005). Many customers choose automated services because they have had bad experiences in interactions with frontline employees and in contrast the infusion of technology may not be embraced by all customers (Bitner et al 2000). Research results are not consistent yet, there are many fields that still have to be examined. In this research we have analyzed the IT use of 179 Hungarian companies in their marketing activities. The middle and top management of the companies were surveyed in the winter of 2010. As we hypothesized the results are mixed but give us important insights into the topic in question