Factors Affecting e-Marketing Adoption and Implementation in Food Firms: An Empirical Investigation of Greek Food and Beverage Firms

The objective of this study is to explore the implementation and adoption of e-Marketing in Food and Beverage firms in Greece. Implementation includes the use levels of e-marketing tools and adoption factors that are relating to the internal environment (internal factors), Technology Acceptance Model, and Innovation Diffusion Theory. The combined knowledge of both implementation and adoption responds to an effort to understand the firms’ performance from the use of innovative electronic services. In terms of adoption, e-Marketing enhances job performance, goes with firms’ organizational culture; it is easy for adopters to interact with e-Marketing tools and does not seem to be influenced by the size of businesses. It was also found that customers do not trust the e-Marketing tools due to security issues; and the adoption of digital marketing is due to state incentives and loss avoidance of market share, related to the businesses’ external environment. The study of the effect of e-Marketing implementation in firms’ marketing performance at present and in the future showed that e-Marketing implementation leads to changes in firm performance mainly in terms of the impact on the good customer relationships, fast customer communication, new product development, and the provision of better quality services.