The Internet and international marketing

Abstract

The recent explosion of international business activity on the World Wide Web will have a profound impact on the study and practice of international marketing as we move towards the new millennium. Examines the implications of such developments for international marketing educators and for the mainstream literature on international marketing. Argues that the rapid commercialization of the Internet calls into question many of the fundamental tenets on which most international marketing research and teaching is based, especially the incremental, evolutionary school of internationalization. The Internet presents a fundamentally different environment for international marketing and new paradigms will have to be developed to take account of internationalization processes in an electronic age. This will require the launch of a major new research initiative to improve our understanding of Internet‐enabled international marketing, especially the extent to which the “Net” provides a low cost “gateway” to global markets for small and medium‐sized enterprises. In the absence of such an initiative, the mainstream academic literature will no longer accurately describe the reality of international business.