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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