I used to hate AOL.
And I’ve never even been an AOL customer.
No, I hated AOL because I used to receive email after email – trying to tempt me into switching to their broadband services.
And as soon as I had deleted the emails, I’d frequently throw away AOL DM, or recycle AOL leaflets as they fell out of newspaper supplements with far too much frequency.
But that was a long time ago.
It must have been because I don’t read offline newspapers anymore. And I don’t get AOL junk anymore either.
No, in the meantime AOL has gone up in my estimation.
Their /discuss campaign usefully raised the internet issues at the heart of consumer thinking and encouraged people to talk about them at www.aol.co.uk/discuss.
And now I’ve stumbled across Brand New World an ongoing research study of online consumers by AOL and Henley Centre.
It provides a pretty definitive overview of the way in which the internet is changing both consumers’ behaviours and attributes to brands.
The biggest insights are;
- Consumers’ brand perceptions are being altered by the Internet.
- Consumers are actively switching brands in their online and offline purchases as a result of using the Internet.
- The Internet increases the length of time the purchase process takes, and makes it more complex.
- Consumers are receptive to different types of online information, including commercial sources.
- Price information is important, but it is just one of many reasons why consumers research online.
- Consumers consider some online information sources more important and trustworthy than offline information sources.
- Trust is key to how consumers respond to online influences. It can significantly influence brand switching behaviour.
Nothing new there?
Download the full reports. There is plenty of additional insight ‘between’ the big bits.
I’m still not an AOL customer. But they are earning my attention.
Filed under: Advertising, Branding, Direct Email, Direct Mail, Ideas and Riffs, Strategy, Web, marketing
