Feature | Seek, involve, act and share: Buzzword for online consumers

Microsoft Advertising, MEC and Mindshare recently released a study entitled "Living with the Internet ' What is Driving Web behavior', designed to understand the nature of time spent online across the world. Intended to gain better insights on consumer's web behavior and aid marketers and brands to tap into these insights, the study was undertaken across 11 countries ' Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and the US and focused on 7,000 participants aged between 16 and 54 years old.

The study found that in India, spontaneous activity on the internet has halved in the last two years as consumers, conscious of the addictive nature of the web, try to stay focused and make better use of time spent online. This trend is consistent globally, as worldwide more than 79 per cent of respondents said that they had planned their activity on the internet in advance so that they could stay more focused and do more in less time. Across Asia, as well, this figure is fairly consistent, with Japan topping the list in the proportion of planned visits at 89 per cent; China at 76 per cent and India at 72 per cent.

On the emerging patterns in internet usage, the study also found that majority of time spent online is habitual, with only 16% prompted by an event, conversation or offline media. It revealed that almost all online sessions start with more personal or intimate destinations such as social networks, emails and blogs; go to the more public forums such as news, entertainment and search; finally going back to the personal destinations.

So with all these potential findings we faced the very important question about how does one really target the very discerning, very busy and very vocal online consumer?

Adgully caught up with industry top leaders to resolve the issue at hand.

Talking about how an online consumer is reached effectively, Neville Taraporewalla, Director ' Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft India, says, "A communication should always depend on what the customer wants. If a client is looking for a certain set of consumers then we will develop the targeting based on that. We target consumers on the basis of demographics, age and agenda. So we have registered database which is a very important insight through which we segment the consumers to provide our clients a better reach and an effective reach. We do target specific targeting and we charge a premium for that, since we are assuring a more focused reach."

However, Gowthaman Ragothaman, Leader, South Asia, Mindshare, adds, "The first and foremost question is - what is the marketing objective and is this medium helping the consumer engage or not. It is not like a traditional communication channel where I run a promo and talk about reach and awareness. Through the digital media I will be interested in knowing if my consumers are reacting back to my brand's presence on the digital space. We classify it as seek, involve, act and share."

The study also fond out that more than half of the people on the internet, irrespective of what their motivation for being there are, are multi-tasking. In an increasingly connected and multi-tasking world this means, that brands need to create strong somatic markers for themselves.

So how do brands really catch the consumer's fleeting attention?

Gowthaman says, "In this medium communication is permission based, it is a lean-forward medium. If a consumer is going online, the consumer does so with a purpose. So attention is not really a concern, it is about how can we keep the consumer hooked on to the conversation."

The study in all tried to encompass the behavioural pattern of an online consumer and as an evangelizing act Gowthaman and Taraporewalla both agree that there are not many behavioural studies done in the country pertaining to online consumers.

Agreeing with the men here, Shubha George, Chief Operating Officer, MEC South Asia, says, "Not many behavioural studies are being done on online consumers which is why we are taking this initiative and coming out with this study. I think for a medium which is so rapidly changing there is not frequent a study as is necessary. This is one lacunae due to which the medium is not growing as fast as it should."

So while seek, involve, act and share seems to be the buzzword, online consumers are awaiting for an interaction to happen and the brands need to carry this conversation forward very well. Moreover marketers and digital leaders need to seriously look at understanding the 'on-line' consumer as soon as possible. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]