Trends and Theories

Some thoughts and ponderings from the middle of the day:
The internet provides history's more rapidly changing mass-market-envoronment combined with history's most deflationary force ever. The speed at which it allows markets to completely change is unparallelled and our knowledge of what worked in the past (2 years ago) is rendered obsolete by our lack of knowledge of what is working (and failing) right now.
An interesting trend is continuing to be uncovered in on-line sales of brick and mortar retailers: they can compete in the online world with the low-cost WalMarts and Amazon.com's, it just takes them longer to get started. It usually takes the local b&m retailer 12-18 months to ramp up on-line sales of their goods through their web site. Why?
1. It takes time to educate your customer base. Eveyone knows about Amazon.com or Flowers.com. Your customers, and they're your local initially, don't know about YourStore.com and what it can offer them. It takes time, often up to a year or so to reach your customers and train them to shop or browse on your web site. People's behavior patterns weren't formed overnight, nor do then change in the blink of an eye. Great aspects of internet marketing, unlink traditional print, radio, or TV marketing, are that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and you can easily put metrics to your campaigns to see what is working and what's flopping.
2. Customers are changing their buying patterns. Customer still like to 'kick the tires' on many products, but they don't have hours to spend browsing through your store. A buying pattern that is emerging this year has been the 'order online and puckup in store.' This combines the convenience of online selection and purchasing with the reassurance of in store product examining. It takes a 30-120 minute shopping trip and condenses it into a 5-10 minute quick stop--while still getting the customer in your door.
3. Age. Customers over the age of 35 compare prices online and convenience-shop online. Customers under 35 tend to buy with a hive mentailty online, communicating with like-minded groupd and friends to uncover both good deals and 'hot' products for any given market segment. If your retail demo. is the over-35 crowd, then your online sales will ramp up more slowly than if your target market was under 30. Over time, this will continue to shift and of course these customer behavior patterns create, and will continue to create, new and widely different marketing campaigns and opportunities.
4. Convenience. Many retailers are surprised at how many of their customers place orders on-line for products that they could easily pick up the telephone and order or stop by the store and purchase on their way home from work. When polled, the customers liked the convenience of shopping on-line, the anonymity of it (no pestering sales clerks), the ability to easily price-shop within your store, the quiet on-line store (no-one can overhear an on-line order being placed, unlike a telephone order), and the speed of purchasing on-line vs. purchasing in store.