The Impact of Business to Consumer E Commerce on Organizational Structure, Brand Architecture, IT Structure and their Interrelations

Previous research on e-commerce has analyzed its influence on organizational structure, brand management, and IT structure separately. Drawing on transaction cost theory, we analyze the simultaneous impacts of business-to-consumer (B2C) e commerce on organizational structure, brand architecture, and IT structure. We survey 49 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and 49 chief information officers (CIOs) of 64 out of the 100 most important consumer brand companies in Austria. We show that the amount of change in all three structural elements increases as the importance they attach to B2C e commerce grows. Furthermore, the amount of change in both brand architecture and organizational structure and in brand architecture and IT structure are significantly linked to each other, even after we control for the importance of B2C e commerce. We find mixed results for the hypothesis that higher levels of importance of B2C e commerce enhance the dependence of the marketing-related IT structure on changes in brand architecture.