How Does the Internet Impact Consumer Behavior

Chris

As I have commented elsewhere, it is a very interesting paper. While I think the recommendations for embracing the online and social element are spot on, I take issue with the scale of the index - particularly Internet beating TV two to one.

This index is based on people rationalising an emotion. How does one quantify and distribute influence? The Internet, as a repository of information and channel of communication and commerce is undoubtedly important, but TV and press also hold a lot of sway, albeit earlier and less consciously. These therefore shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly once synergies and media multiplier effects are counted into.

Furthermore, the way that Internet drives is also very category specific. On some occasions it is as word of mouth recommendation, on others it is as a trusted transactional offering. It is of vital importance to distinguish between these and take action appropriate to your particular offering.

Still, it was a very thought-provoking study, and credit to Harris Interactive and Fleishman-Hillard for adding to the conversation

Simon

Looks like people are more likely interested about the things they read on the internet. But internet could be more corrupted than other medias, like anyone can write a positive review on war or drugs if they are paid to do so. People will likely to believe the author because he has a huge follower!

So I think it will come down to some level of trust. I'm not sure how this will be reflected digitally, but that's one of the major themes of the book I'm writing with Julien Smith.

Without a doubt the internet has catapulted into a regular reference for many and is rapidly growing towards the dominating resource for our society. Product reviews, directions, contact information etc. etc. where does one turn? The internet more often than not..I do, and so do many others. Unfortunately the internet has much less qualifying or filtering if you will, the result anything can be said without validation or confirmation. So it is important as a consumer to find reliable, reputable resources to reference. Is there a single site for people to trust and use as a guide? I haven't found it. Any suggestions? Great post!

The paper for the most part reflects my own views.

If I had to give up either cable or the Internet, there would be now question as to I now feel that I can no longer live without the Internet as a source of learning and entertaining.
I can easily live without both as I am not dependant on it for social connections and there are many other opportunities to ongoing learning such as books and hanging out with people of similar interests.

The apparent contradiction to the web being a source of information and at the same time not very trustworthy does make sense to me. If I examine my own habits to surfing then if I am unable to ascribe a trust factor to web source I need to find more divergent sources that support the information to increase my confidence factor.

But most important if it seems to be too-good-to-be-true then there is probably a catch. Most of all common sense must prevail.

Niels Henriksen

I saw this post immediately after reading, "The End of Advertising, and Why We Should Celebrate." — funny how things come together.

As far as trustworthiness, I think this is where building a personal brand becomes important. Amazon enables this in a sense by allowing you to easily discover other products someone has reviewed. If a product review sounds too corporate and it's the only review on their profile, would you trust that person? Maybe Amazon needs a reviewer trust meter....

So it seems that users feel they have the ability to sift through the web's info to make their own decision.

Is that the same as 60% of teh time it works all teh time? how are you Chris?

Is that the same as 60% of the time it works all the time? how are you Chris?

This was a great paper but I'm wondering if anyone knows if a similar study was was done for North America and, in particular, Canada.

Thanks.

Well, the findings should be taken with a pinch of salt, I guess. As an academic I always look into the issue of social desirability of results and then impact of bias which occurs from various stakeholders including the interviewer, interviewee and the response itself. While the authors of the report do talk about propensity scoring, they hardly talk about how other biases were removed from the study. Moreover, percentages are not really the best method to suggest significance in research findings, is it? Secondly, how did the authors established the representativeness of the sample?

Pardon me for these questions but I always follow the ad-age: 'if it's too good to be true, it is'. I don't mean to say that this report is completely wrong and the findings are not true. What I am saying is that 'caution' is required rather than generalising findings on the basis of percentages. Should I call it the 'percentage novice bias'?