Editorial

Citation

McAuley, A. (1999), "Editorial", Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmpams.1999.15505aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to another year of JMP:AMS. I look forward to publishing another varied volume of articles to the same high standards as those included in Volume 4. This will include a special issue on "Marketing and older consumers" to be guest edited by Isabelle Szmigin and Marylyn Carrigan. In the meantime as Editor I am pleased to be able to tell you about three new developments in the life of this still relatively young journal. Professor Paula Swatman from RMIT University in Melbourne has been appointed as Australasian Regional Editor while Lisa Klein from Harvard Business School has agreed to be the North American Regional Editor. In addition to these appointments, Simpson Poon, based at the Murdoch University in Western Australia, has become our Internet Editor. Thanks are due to Rebecca Needham who, in her role as Managing Editor for this journal, has worked hard to bring this "new blood" on board. I very much welcome this strengthening of the editorial team and look forward to their contributions over this coming year.

The first issue of Volume 5 contains two articles that consider issues related to relationship marketing. Long et al. approach the topic from the viewpoint of just how do customers feel about information being gathered and held about them by commercial organisations? Relationship marketing implies a level of trust and openness between partners, but what about privacy? Does a ne plus ultra line exist in the commercial relationship? This paper established that consumers have different privacy thresholds depending partly on internal factors such as their level of involvement with the topic of data collection and their perception of the trustworthiness of the companies involved. It appears consumers trust utility companies more than the DIY sector and electrical stores.

In the second article by Gilbert et al. the ability of hotels to use the Internet is assessed by looking at how the hotels are using the Web and how management is reacting to its use as a relationship marketing tool. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some hotels have a long way to go in getting the basics right, never mind developing relationship marketing! I'm still waiting since last April for an e-mail reply to an inquiry made via a Web site to a hotel in the Caribbean. Recently a colleague booked accommodation in a hotel in Sri Lanka over the Web. Arriving at the airport at 2am his pick-up failed to show! It is then not surprising that this article finds that many hotels have not yet fully exploited the Web and relationship marketing. While the larger hotel chains acknowledge the future importance of the Web as a marketing mechanism to create a competitive edge, limits are imposed by existing technology and companies' willingness to let the Web assume a bigger marketing role. This article provides an important measure of the industry currently; one which future authors will look back to in the next century to see just how far they have come.

Andrew McAuleyEditor