See the rest of the reasons here.

Why People Go Online (source: eMarketer.com citing Ruder Finn)

According to Ruder Finn, in the second quarter of 2009, 100% of US Internet users that they surveyed went online to pass time. The other top destinations were education, connecting with others, research and sharing.

Ironically, among the least common intentions of Internet users going online were making a purchase, managing finances, comparison shopping or joining a cause.

There is no doubt, knowing your customers and their behavior as much as possible is one of the most important keys to success in the current economy, since the product driven markets are long gone, being replaced with the customer driven markets.

Thus, if you want to be successful online, identify a niche that is sizable, marketable and potentially profitable, focus on solving a problem of that niche, under promise and over deliver and you might just strike gold.

There’s not even that many types of activities that people perform online, Ruder Finn listing a mere six of them, ordered from most common to least common:

• Learn
• Have fun
• Socialize
• Express oneself
• Advocate
• Do business
• Shop

In terms of gender interests, the study showed that more men went online to do business or have fun as compared to women, while the later group was more interested in advocating over the Internet, express themselves or socialize. What is interesting is that 69% of young adults have been active on social networking sites, while 55% of them went online to play games.

via eMarketer.com.

I won’t go into the details of his report, since you can read it fully on the Guardian, but I will give you the summary of what’s hot and what’s not in the teenagers’ world:

What is hot?

• Anything with a touch screen is desirable.
• Mobile phones with large capacities for music.
• Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)
• Really big tellies

What is not?

• Anything with wires
• Phones with black and white screens
• Clunky ‘brick’ phones
• Devices with less than ten-hour battery life

Via Mihnea Maruta.

I was puzzled, because I did not expect such thing, but while waiting for my selection of food to be packed up and for the owner to prepare the promotional taco he promised me, we engaged in a very relaxed conversation about what he was trying to do there. He was unsure what type of products his customers preferred, because he had no feedback tool to get this kind of information, and he also wanted to introduce new products, but was again unsure if they would be successful or not.

I gave him my personal take on his product offering, what I liked from there and what not, and what else I would be interested to see in his product portfolio. The guy was very relaxed, very honest and very open to all the suggestions that I made, transmitting them to his employees to take notes. He seemed genuinely interested in improving his product offering and was conducting his own market research to help him in the process.

After a while, I received my special taco and it proved to be quite tasty. However, since it was done from minced meat, I also told him that some more health aware individuals might avoid it for this reason and he adapted immediately to the suggestion, saying that they should probably not mince the meat, but rather cut it in thin slices, so that it looks more appealing, while it could also be spiced up properly.

Eventually we ended our conversation, I took my food and went home to eat. While eating, I kept thinking about the fact that, if you really want to do something new and are unsure about it, is not that hard to get feedback from your customers, regardless how small your business is or how unimportant this might seem. Even though the guy was running a Mexican Fast Food Store, he was flexible enough to think outside his traditional “Mexican” product offering box and actually create new products that would fit better his customers.

Taking the story above into account, I think it makes sense to take the time and think about how you could obtain direct feedback from your customers the next time you meet with your colleagues and brainstorm about new products or improvements to existing products. You might just receive the feedback that will allow you to come to market with a product that will solve some of your customers most important problems. As I said, when in doubt, try talking to your customers.

(originally published at: blog.ceubusiness.ro)

iPhone - Most Desired Smartphone? (source: www.journaldugeek.com)

In my last post I was referring to some of the reasons why Apple is not a exclusivist company anymore, but rather a mainstream one (as mentioned by Wired). Today, I’ve ran into a funny picture that was used as a signature by someone posting on a video games forum. The image reflects exactly the feelings expressed in the third comment of the previous post:

“I just bought a few weeks an iPhone 3G and I don’t understand why I have paid a price for it as for a SmartPhone and all I have got from them is a crippled phone with [almost no] functionality. There is no basic functionality that other smart phones on the market have.”

If we look at the picture to the left, an important number of standard features of today’s smartphones, or even regular multimedia phones, for that matter, are missing in the iPhone. Despite not having what we call costs of entry for this type of phones (their product category), the iPhone is still one of the best selling smart phones out there. If we still had any doubts, this should probably confirm to us that customers do purchase on emotional impulses rather than rational choices among alternatives.

So why is the consumer behavior such a strange animal? Why do we still buy products that we’re not really happy with or that we know that others are not happy with as customers? We call ourselves rational and social animals, yet we buy based on emotional reasons (most probably, our social aspect kicks in here, because we all like to be seen as cool). Have you ever rationally dissected your purchase behavior to see wether you’re exhibiting an emotional or a rational buying behavior? How does this differ depending on the type of products you’re buying?