CHAPTER ONE
1.1 Background of the Study
Internet has grown tremendously in its both applications and number of users due to its unique characteristics of flexibility, interactivity and personalization. It has been a very useful tool for communication, entertainment, marketing, education and electronic trade. (Ko; Jung; Kim and Shim 2008; Koyuncu and Lien 2011). The revolutionary change brought forth by information technology has an important impact on our daily lives. It has transformed the way we do business by allowing retailers to offer unlimited range of products and services to all consumers from around the world at any point in time. According to Silk; Klein and Berndt (2010), assumed that the Internet has emerged as an advertising medium, in their views, many companies have turned to the Internet to advertise their products and services; and that the Internet is deemed to be the most significant direct marketing channel for the global market place.
Kotler, (2006), explained that advertisers and companies are spending millions of naira into internet advertising just to obtain greater return on investment on ads. The above assumption was further supported by Edwards, (2005), when he postulated that companies, who knows its onus and wished to continue enjoying the patronage of prospective market cannot joke with advertising, especially direct advertising such as Internet advertising.
The Internet as a medium of communication has existed since the late 1960s, when a limited number of computers were connected in the United States from the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), according to Chaffey; Mayer; Johnson and Ellis-Chadwick, (2006). Until the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990, the Internet was almost entirely unknown outside Universities and corporate research departments and was accessible mostly via command line interface such as Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
In the words of Griffiths (2008), indicates that the recent dramatic growth in the use of the Internet has occurred because of the development of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web changed the Internet from a difficult – to – use tool for academic and technicians to an easy-to-use tool for finding businesses and consumers. Since then, the Internet has grown to become an almost ubiquitous aspect of modern information system, becoming highly commercial and widely accepted medium for all sorts of consumer relations such as advertising, online sales and services, (Asemah, 2010).
In supporting the above claims, Korgaonkar and Wolin (2006), postulate that the internet has given consumers more control in accessing information on product and services. There are several factors that contribute to consumers pull for online content and as such, Ko; Jung; Kim and Shims (2008), explains that the Internet enables consumers to access an unlimited range of product and services from companies around the world, and it has reduces the time and effort they spend on physical shopping.
Consumers according to Smith (2009), posits that consumers play a much more active role in searching for information online with some with some goals in mind, and that goal can influence individual behaviours and responses to online information and advertisement. With the rapid advancement in the computer industry, many companies have made the Internet as part of their advertising media mix to take advantage of the online technologies.