Marketing has come full circle – from the person-to-person selling of the village corner store of times gone bye, to the impersonal world of mass media and mass merchandising, and now back once again to highly personalized customer contact strategies and an era of relationship based marketing. All this has been made possible by the wide proliferation of information technology and new interactive media (Rapp and Collins 1996). This progression from personalized to mass marketing and now back to personalized marketing has been a result of multiple environmental variables. The initial small town storeowner catered to a.
