Extending TAM and IDT to Predict the Adoption of the Internet for B-to-B Marketing Activities: An Empirical Study of UK Companies

There has been considerable Research into the usage of the Internet for Business-to-Business (B-to-B) marketing activities in recent years. The need to understand how and why B-to-B companies utilize the Internet is important for researchers and practitioners alike. This study combines Davis’ model-the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)- and Roger’s Theory- the Innovation diffusion Theory (IDT) to understand the process of Internet adoption for marketing purposes. It makes a comprehensive review of information technology, information systems, and marketing literature to locate factors that predict Internet use for marketing purposes. Moreover, it extends both TAM and IDT to find out factors that affect relative advantage, ease of use and compatibility of using the Internet for B-to-B marketing activities. Using a sample of 123 UK companies utilize the Internet, we found a substantial positive effect of the proposed factors on the Internet usage for B-to-B marketing activities.