Fudan hosts Internet marketing forum

Internet marketing has empowered many businesses to find consumers with less cost, but it also brought challenges to an orderly market, participants said during the Shanghai Marketing Forum held at Fudan University on Friday.

“Internet marketing, which has a history of no more than two decades, has become the most popular way to get in touch with consumers these days,” said Liu Yunchuan, a professor at the business school of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The forum coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Marketing Department at Fudan’s School of Management. It has also been made an annual event, with one to be held in Tongji University next year.

Chen Xinkang, chairman of the Shanghai Marketing Association, said Internet marketing has changed the landscape of how to access targeted consumers and made it extremely important to excel on search engines.

“While technologies have made marketing more flexible and efficient, they also created challenges such as less reliability,” Chen said.

Lu Xiongwen, dean of the School of Management at Fudan, said scholars, entrepreneurs ad consumers should work together to map out a route for the development of marketing.