The competitive development of flowers and ornamentals firms through the use of web-marketing strategies: a survey in the convergence objective regions in Italy

The growth of ICT, and in particular the integrated use of internet within firm marketing strategies, has brought about deep changes at both sector and firm level. Firm processes have been drastically modified in their communication and promotional aspects. In particular, firmcustomer relationships are changing and therefore internet represents a preferential means, not only for transferring the firm image in the global communication, but above all in order to build a dialogue and a continuous interaction which contribute to consumers’ fidelization. This empirical research proposal is to be considered in the framework of “Business to Consumer” relationships and is addressed to the flowers and ornamentals firms of Southern Italy which have adopted internet as a means of communication and marketing. The study has the aim to assess website quality of a random sample of firms by following the standard methodologies proposed in the international literature. These techniques allow researchers to evaluate overall quality through the perception of web users or privileged respondents (sector experts). The approach here adopted is the one proposed by Cox and Dale (2002); the authors analyze website quality and its capacity for achieving customer fidelization based on four criteria: website size and quality, capacity for supplying products and services, potentiality for inspiring confidence and fidelize the customer. Another factor is important, the capacity of the website to contextualize information with reference to purchase or product consumption experiences (Ottimo, 2000). In a globalised scenario where competitiveness in the international market becomes more and more a critical success factor, flowers firms of the Italian Mezzogiorno regions could draw market advantages from their presence on the internet with high quality websites.