online consumer demographics & expectations

This page looks at some of the literature about marketing online, including industry and academic studies.

     demographics

This section is under development and for the moment the detailed pointers are in the Metrics guide.

Media Metrix published a US-centric report (PDF) in August 2000 on The Dollar Divide: Demographic Segmentation & Web Usage Patterns By Household Income. 

Seize the Occasion - Usage-based Segmentation for Internet Marketers, a study from Booz-Allen & Hamilton suggests you should forget demographics or attitudinal data in favour of "occasionalization" with seven segments (equivalent to types of session online) that included the 'Information Please', 'Loitering' and 'Surfing' markets. All very jazzy but, alas, reminiscent of earlier e-shopping categories such as Paco Underhill's 'Mr Grab-&-Go', 'The Browser With Time To Kill' and other gems.

The Marriott School of Management's IBM-sponsored Internet Usability Study (here) has a similar categorisation. Perhaps there's only so many ways to slice the salami. The study divides shoppers and non-shoppers into eight segments – Shopping Lovers, Adventurous Explorers, Suspicious Learners, Business Users, Fearful Browsers, Shopping Avoiders, Technology Muddlers and Fun Seekers.

     studies

We've supplied detailed guidance about measurement of the Web, e-commerce projections (which are often ludicrously skew-whiff) and demographics in our Metrics guide. 

There are useful pointers in the major 1999 US conference on Understanding The Digital Economy: Data, Tools & Research (organised by MIT and the Digital Economy office of the US Commerce Department) and Current State of Play (2nd Edition), the quarterly statistical report from Australia's National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE). 

The State of the Net 1999, a snapshot by the US Internet Council of access, ecommerce, traffic and other Internet developments in the land of the free. 

     hardcopy

Patricia Seybold's Customers.com (New York, Times 98), noted elsewhere on this site, hammers home the point that you must be driven by your customers, not by your IT people or the turtlenecks.  

Tom Murphy's Web Rules: How the Internet is Changing the Way Consumers Make Choices (Chicago: Dearborn 2000) is less engaging. It's a superficial, upbeat tour de horizon of bots and 'markets of one'. Its value lies in the interviews with the likes of Intel's Andy Grove, Mike Bloomberg, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, guru Paul Saffo, novelist Paul Erdman and financier Ann Winblad.

Regis McKenna's amiable Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never-Satisfied Customer (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1997) offers insights into information systems and relationship-building online.

Michael J Wolf's The Entertainment Economy (New York: Times 1999) makes a persuasive though often overstated case that we're all living in the 'entertainment' rather than the information economy: forget the entertainment and your consumer will click on to the next site.  

A similar spin is provided by B Joseph Pine & James Gilmore in The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1999) which mingles aphorisms about service with a vision of business as theatre: in marketing goods and services you'll succeed if you think of yourself as an actor in a great drama, with an ensemble and scenery to match - whether you're selling a cup of coffee or a public transport system. It's a message many bodies online would be wise to heed, although we warn against the experience of some sites whose designers assume you visit to swoon at the digital scenery rather engaging in a transaction.

David Lewis & Darren Bridger in The Soul of the New Consumer: Authenticity, What We Buy and Why in the New Economy (London: Nicholas Brealey 2000) argues that the 'killer app' is to be 'authentic'. Alas, authenticity means more than slapping on a gold 'authentic' label - like that found on their book - or issuing edicts that "buzz beats hype", "individual tastespace will triumph in the marketplace" and "segmentation is dead". 

We suspect that Lewis and mates have overindulged in the pop sociology of Malcolm Gladwell's fatuous The Tipping Point (New York: Little Brown 2000): a dash of chaos theory, a pinch of amorphous concepts such as 'stickiness', Dale Carnegie uplift, a few buzzwords such as 'maven' and anecdotes about selling shoes to yuppies don't offer an effective prescription for marketing online. A corrective is provided in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2006) by Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton.

From another perspective the much-hyped Permission Marketing (New York, Simon and Schuster 1999) by Seth Godin (Yahoo! DM Vice-Prez) and Emanuel Rosen's more substantial The Anatomy of Buzz: How To Create Word-Of-Mouth Marketing (New York: Doubleday 2000) explore online marketing, based on interaction with the consumer rather than the couch potato passively receiving (and frequently rejecting) broadcast information. 

Many of the approaches explored by Godin appear in Personalization.Com, a 'personalisation' marketing site. Jakob Nielsen's October 2000 paper on 'Request Marketing' is more perceptive.

We were impressed by Eric Marder's The Laws of Choice: Predicting Customer Behaviour (New York: Free Press 1997), a detailed study by one of marketing's grand old men. Laws examines consumer survey methodologies, marketing strategy evaluation, pricing and advertising. The book draws heavily on empirical studies and is 'statistics-rich', so be prepared to blow the cobwebs from your stats textbooks before you immerse yourself in his provocative and fascinating analysis.

T.G. Lewis' The Friction-Free Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1997) is a worth a glance. Guy Kawasaki's Rules For Revolutionaries (New York: HarperCollins 1999) is a self-described 'capitalist manifesto' from the Apple evangelist.

Among the recent wave of 'advertising online' books, often built on the premise that viewing a computer rather than tv screen somehow makes consumers immensely susceptible, you might want to look at Advertising on the Internet (New York: Wiley 1999) by Robbin Zeff & Brad Aronson. 

Having a site - particularly a site that your market can find, that addresses its needs and that is integrated with a broader strategy through for example appropriate promotion offline - is a useful way to build the "community" that's a goal of many of the 'new economy' manuals highlighted in our Economy guide. 

However, it is clear that undifferentiated advertising such as banner ads is generally not effective. That is reflected in their disappearance from many sites. And it is a realisation unsurprising to anyone who recognises that the web is not substantially different from traditional print or electronic media.

     brands and the web

Brand Building On The Internet (South Yarra: Hardie Grant 2000) by Martin Lindstrom & Tim Andersen provides some interesting case studies, though their applicability is often uncertain and the broader picture sketched by the authors is somewhat fuzzy. 

 We suggest that many people would get more value from a critical reading of some of the better 'branding' books, particularly in conjunction with studies such as Paul May's excellent The Business of Ecommerce (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000) and Global Electronic Commerce: Theory & Case Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press 99) by J Christopher Westland & Theodore Clark. Judy Davis' Guide to Web Marketing (London: Kogan Page 2000) is thin and forgettable.

Advertising on the Internet (New York: Wiley 99) is a primer by Robin Zeff & Brad Aronson. It's not particularly analytical but is more down-to-earth than the fervent eBrands: Building An Internet Business At Breakneck Speed (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 00) by Phil Carpenter, built around case studies of Yahoo! and a couple of the dot-coms now sleeping with the fishes. 

Unlike the pundits we're convinced that good old fashioned retailing will be alive and well next century because consumers like good old fashioned service and they like fun, something that few websites provide. Pointers to the future of retailing, finance and online services are provided in our Economy guide.

     market research

ESOMAR - the Netherlands-based World Association of Opinion & Marketing Research Professionals - has published a position paper on the Web & Market Research, setting out guidelines for market research and public opinion gathering. We've highlighted government and advocacy group reports in our Privacy guide.



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