More focus on the psychology of online consumer behaviour is long overdue
Written by David Jones on Friday, 17 July 2009 15:46
Over 1.5bn people across the world now regularly use the internet. UK shoppers alone spent over £13billion online in Q408. As a marketing media the internet is eclipsing all comers. Given all of this isn’t it rather odd that there is no Wiki entry for ‘Online Consumer Psychology’ yet, no authoritative website on the subject and just one academic text dealing with the topic that assembles papers delivered at a conference in 2001 (decades ago in the web world!).
Why is this? Well, perhaps too few marketers, brand managers and their agencies have been asking just that question - Why? Much, if not all, of the focus has been on quantitatively monitoring and measuring online behaviour and transactional data. The standard web metrics are great for understanding ‘where’ and ‘how much’, a lot less great in helping us understand ‘who’ and most crucially ‘why’. Marketing and advertising are increasingly behind the curve of online consumer behaviour, in part at least because they haven’t fully understood the psychological drivers, attitudes and motivations that underlie these behaviours.
Successfully predicting online consumer behaviour and creating sustainable competitive advantages from this knowledge demands that the psychology of online consumer behaviour gets more attention. The brands that give this attention are the most likely prosper when the economy picks up.
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Posted in Online Psychology, Consumer Behaviour | 0 Comments
The Nature of Insight
Written by Stephen Worrall on Thursday, 02 July 2009 15:27
So what is insight? I am sure you have seen the standard definitions "A hidden truth", "A penetrating discovery that unlocks growth", "seeing what everyone else has seen, thinking what no-one else has thought". Most agencies and researchers claim to be able to deliver insight at the drop of a hat. You would think that insights come along as often as London buses, that they just fall out of the research data without any effort. At Demograph we think a bit differently, we try to set the bar a bit higher, we believe that true ground breaking, business building, game changing insights are rare indeed and need to be coaxed from the research findings through creative, team based, category driven understanding. I remember a taxi conversation several years ago with a senior researcher of 30+ years experience, he reckoned to have had about three real insights in his whole career. These were ideas that took his brand in a completely new direction or opened up totally new business opportunities. By contrast I have been in agency debriefs that claim to deliver one insight per chart. Let’s be clear, robust methodology delivers findings, results that need to be interpreted and shaped through the human trait of insightfulness into something deeper, something nuanced something that generates a true eureka moment. As researchers we need to challenge ourselves every day to look for these golden nuggets and to ask ourselves whether we have really drilled down to the essence, to the heart of the research.
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Posted in Demograph, Insight | 0 Comments
What's in a name?
Written by Paul Stallard on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 15:42
Well lots potentially. A good name should be an immediate expression of what you’re all about. It’s important to get it right. You’re stuck with it forever after all. We don’t want our new company being teased in the playground when it goes to school. But coming up with a decent name is quite a challenge. You don’t want something someone else has got already. The url needs to be available. You can’t just pick any old word. Oh no.
We wanted a name that sounded technological and human at the same time. Sort of arts meets science. Digital meets people.
The OED defines demography as
“the study of the structure of human populations using statistics of births, deaths, wealth, disease, etc.”
We go a bit beyond statistics. We like the occasional number. But we use all kinds of tools to study how people think, feel and behave. Especially digital ones. But the spirit was there. And we think it sounds quite distinguished.
So ladies and gentlemen we give you... Demograph. A research company for the digital age.
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Posted in Demograph | 0 Comments
