Do We Need an Interdisciplinary Approach to Bring Consumers' Desires to e-Market?

Introduction

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 2012’s report on the internet advertising revenue, only in the United States of America, the internet advertising revenues reached a total of 36.6 billion dollars for the full year, a growth of 15.2% when compared to 2011 (PWC, 2012), and that may be considered a measure of the importance of e-Marketing. Therefore, it is a measure of the importance to understand consumers’ desires and behaviors. Hence, in this work, we present an approach to bring consumers’ desires to e-Market. Our attempt resulted in a theoretical framework that is the combination of the Internet-Based Information Consumer Theory (IBICT) (Letouze& Oliveira, 2011), semiotics and the Interdisciplinary Research Project Management (IRPM) approach (Letouze, 2011).

IBICT was proposed in an attempt to answer the following question: how does Baudrillard’s object value system apply to the information consumption in the Internet?(Letouze& Oliveira, 2011).Now, the question is: how does the consumers’ desires can be brought to e-Market? Because information in the internet can be understood as an object, IBICT is a suitable background to build on a framework to answer the question. Additionally, objects can be evaluated as signs and symbols. Hence the theory and study of signs and symbols (semiotics) may be a complementary background to IBICT in search of the consumers’ desire.

Semiotics is also closely related to linguistics. In that sense, founded on direction of fit (Ascombe, 1963), word-to-world fit are cognitive attitudes expressed by propositional content in utterance as independently existing state of affairs in the world. In contrast, the world-to-word fit are conative attitudes that normally expresses a yet to be realized state of affairs, as a setup of a desire.

Instinctively, the use of the world-to-word fit concept for text mining could identify utterances from customers that express their desires.

A speech act in linguistics is an utterance that attempts to change the reality that they are describing. Austin (1962) defined an illocutionary act as an attempt to communicate by expressing an attitude. Back to works of Searle (1976), the illocutionary acts from Austin (1962) revisited, Searle refers to Ascombe(1963) works for differences in direction of fit between words and world, classifying promises and requests as being to get the world to match the words. For differences in expressed psychological states, Searle describes desires as a request: when an agent requests someone to do something, then he expresses a desire (want, wish) that someone do something. For intentions, Searle defines as someone doing a promise to do something.

For our market purposes strategies in this work, we need to define in some way a different approach to Searle’s desire definition. We want to do a difference between when someone wants (desire or wish) to something happens, in contrast of, when someone do an actual action to something happens. This approach can distinguish when a customer has a desire to buy some product or service, but has done nothing to its realization. An opposing to when a customer has an intention to buy some product or service and actually has done something straightforward to make it happens.