Re: Your wisdom needed !! Re: Your wisdom needed !!> What's worth to be investigated ? What does marketeers want to
> know about marketing on the internet ? Etc., Etc..
Here are some empirical questions that I believe are open.
Who uses the Internet? What are their media habits,
interests and lifestyles? Where do they live?
How willing or likely are various groups of people to
actually buy things via the net? Who is the Internet
shopper? More generally, who is the online shopper?
There is a whole set of questions that I might call
protocol analysis. Here you could rig up a browser
to keep a log of everything that a consumer looks at.
How exactly do they wander? How does their search
proceed? Do people aimlessly surf or are they more
directed? We get some of this at our sites via the
log files, but only so long as they are visiting our
one site. How long do they stay on the Web at one time?
Where do they usually begin their wanderings? What
is the relative number of URLs that are explicitly
typed in versus the number that are visited by clicking
on a link? How many sites per week does a typical
net user visit? Are there age and gender differences
in browsers.
How does page design impact choice? This is a huge topic,
but let me illustrate the kinds of questions you might
look at just thinking about price. What happens to sales
when you put the price on the main page vs. the last
menu item? How about if you have a toolbar with a $ sign
(or whatever currency) above each item for sale?
Page and site design questions need not be an exercise
in "try it out and see which works best." There is
a rich history of marketers utilizing insights from
cognitive psychology. Look at a good Consumer
Behavior textbook for starters.
When, if ever, is a hierarchical design better (leads to
higher sales) and when is cross-linking better? Is a flat
menu space (one big menu with a lot of entries where each
entry is a branch end) or a deep menu space (one primary,
four secondary, 16 tertiary, ...) better? In what way
does the answer to this question depend on the specific
product category?
How about search engines? How will this impact what people
buy? What if you could search by price instead of by
item? What if you could search by item and then sort by
price? Would this make folks more price sensitive? Let
me rephrase that. How much more price sensitive would
this make folks?
What products are especially amenable to sales via the net?
I have my theories here, but not much hard data.
Now Joris, hopefully when you answer all these questions,
shall we say by no later than Tuesday of next week, you
should summarize what you found and post it to the list.
_________________________________________New_South_Network_Services
Charlie Hofacker http://nsns.com/
chofack@nsns.com +1.904.385.8704