© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Teaching in a virtual classroom over the past few months has made me think about how the thoughts and actions of digital customers are different from what marketers have traditionally thought of as customer behavior. The pandemic has accelerated the change by getting people to engage in activities that they carried out either infrequently or probably never, be it online shopping, online banking, working at home, or even using a laptop. This article is an attempt to examine how today’s digital customer differs from the traditional customer, and the implications that this holds for businesses. The views presented here are based on my observations and do not claim to be comprehensive.

First, the digital customer is often, but not always, characterized by behaviors that digital technology allows for. The most common behavior is that of easy switching between activities, which was first evident when the television remote came into the market. Switching occurs because consumers want variety, can easily move between windows, and there are lots of activities competing for their attention – motivation, ability, and opportunity, as consumer research would call it.

Not surprisingly, there is a decrease in attention span or the longest duration for which a person can engage continuously in a single activity. This implies that for students and consumers of online learning programs, engagement is no longer a given, and involvement through immersion needs active effort from the consumer. There is also a seamless merger of activities, especially due to pandemic-driven trends such as work from home and webinars: coffee with work is passe, and dinner with an office meeting or a webinar with one’s pet in attendance (partly due to time zone issues) has become the norm, not to mention the new fashion of formals above and casuals below.

There are other behaviors that are shaped by a set of emergent beliefs. The digital customer is used to and demands immediate availability, be it streaming a movie or confirmation of a digital payment. Expectations have so changed that “fast” is now the baseline; quick responses are given and are expected by customers. This is also reflected in the increasingly common action of rapid sharing through forwarding of content, and was recently the subject of a joke on Whatsapp that told us that a “straightforward” person was someone who forwarded everything straightaway upon receiving. Such behavior, more reactive than reflexive, does have negative consequences such as polarizing of opinions.

At the same time, the digital customer understands the idea of non-rivalrous distribution of digital goods – copies are costless, and more people attending a webinar does not make it worse for the others. Concurrently, there is greater expectation of access to information, products, and skills. All of this could lead to issues of copyright violation, but could help build a more inclusive world.

Finally, there are a few concrete changes that mark the shift from the traditional customer to the digital customer. The digital customer has a newer, different definition for the meanings of relationships, be it employment (work from home), friendship (never met), neighborhood (online communities), or others. Reliance on large institutions is reducing, as evidenced by freelancing and the gig economy, and self-publication of books and video channels. However, reliance on certain other types of institutions, especially aggregators (cab sharing) and platforms (e-commerce), is increasing.

All of the above give rise to certain implications for businesses that aim to serve today’s digital customer. Easy comparisons between competing products and prices are possible and regularly carried out by customers, and businesses need to work even harder to communicate the real value that they are providing. More so when customers are quick to communicate their views through product reviews, social media, and other channels. The importance of strong brands is increasing in some ways as brands continue to indicate quality and familiarity and lead to immediate recognition, but is also decreasing in some other ways as smaller brands make inroads through e-commerce.

Despite these changes, the digital customer is still a bundle of contradictions as customers have always been – wanting to belong but also wanting to stand out, seeking the excitement of novelty but also the comfort of familiarity, wanting more but also wanting less, hurrying but also being slow, feeling but also thinking, and thinking but also feeling. It is unlikely that businesses need to relearn all the lessons they have learnt about customers but some of the lessons need careful review.