The Impact of Manager's Attitude Towards Internet Marketing on Internet Marketing Adoption in Organizations (Case Study: Book-Publishing and Distribution Companies in Iran)

In today’s turbulent and competitive market, organizations tend to use Internet marketing for achieving and maintaining optimal performance in order to gain competitive advantage. One of the most important success factors in Internet marketing is the support of top managers of the organization. Since there has been a limited number of researches investigating the relationship between "top managers’ supportive attitude" and "the extent to which Internet marketing is used", this paper seeks to identify, categorize, and provide indicators for measuring these two variables in book publishing and distribution companies. This study is a descriptive survey research and the data has been collected by sending electronic questionnaires to the top managers and marketing managers of under-research companies. The results indicate that there is a weak positive correlation between these two variables. In other words, the use of Internet marketing in under-research companies doesnt seem to have a strong relationship with manager's attitudes, and there are other factors involved. However, knowing the top managers’ attitude will lead to appropriate decisions on using resources for implementation of Internet marketing.