Adoption of Online Marketing in the Malaysian Hotel Sector from an Organizational Innovativeness Perspective

Online marketing is the latest Internet-based marketing medium and is well received by the hotels industry worldwide. It has beneficial features that make it useful to the industry; therefore, the Malaysian hotel industry can be expected to adopt online marketing. However, as of 2002, this was not happening, as the majority of them appeared not to have been utilizing this marketing medium. This situation invited questions as to why so few Malaysian hotels were adopting the technology. This study found that researches on factors that influence the adoption by Malaysian hotels is still lacking. Therefore, utilizing the organizational innovativeness framework to explain the adoption of technology from the perspective of an organization, it tried to 1) identify the factors that have significant influence on Malaysian hotels toward adopting online marketing, 2) examine the nature of the relation between these identified factors and the hotels’ online marketing adoption behavior, and 3) examine how these factors interact with each other in regard to their relationships with the hotels’ adoption behavior. Derived from the previous conceptual framework of Tornatzky and Fleischer (1990), a research model for this study was developed. In testing the research model, data analysis required the use of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). This mainly involved the use of the LISREL program, with SPSS utilized to conduct certain tests. The results indicated that the online marketing adoption by Malaysian hotels was positively influenced by the 1) the support shown by the hotels’ top management for online marketing adoption, and 2) the reserved resources owned by these hotels. This study also found that the existence of hotels’ management’s support for adoption had a positive influence on the hotels’ reserved resources relationship with the hotels’ online marketing adoption behavior.

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