| Summary: | This thesis looks back over a ca 10-year period, 1994 - 2005, on the use of marketing communication tools in industrial markets. The year 1994 is significant in two ways: First, it was the year I was hired as a doctoral student at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The year is also significant as it is around this time (1994-95) that the Internet became commercialized and openly available for use beyond simple, point-and-click information retrieval. This decade-long journey was broken into two parts: The first part explored the entire industrial marketing communication toolbox, where both personal and non-personal tools, as well as the emerging Internet were used for industrial sellers to provide information, as compared to what industrial buyers were using to obtain information. The second part looked at the Internet as a marketing communication tool onto itself. The first part of the study (1994 - 1998), resulted in a Licentiate thesis entitled "Industrial Marketing Communication: An Empirical Investigation on the Use of Marketing Communication Tools" (Foster, 1998). It is provided here synoptically as Study A. In Study A, industrial sellers and buyers were investigated as to how they utilized all of the marketing communication tools within the industrial marketing communication toolbox. It was found that there was still a heavy reliance on personal, non-commercial forms of marketing communication, primarily personal selling. The non-personal forms of marketing communication, or the "tools" within the compartments of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing, were also utilized, but not in the same way or to the same degree. The Internet was seen neither as a purely personal nor as only a non-personal form of communication, so it was given its own "compartment" in the toolbox, as highlighted in Study A's conceptual framework as an additional (new) "industrial cyber space" (or area) within the toolbox. Although being utilized at the time by industrial sellers and buyers, ...
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