Category Archives: Digital Customer

Potential Customer, or Buyer? A ‘Hand-Raise’ Cannot Tell You

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

Remember that time you went to buy clothes – you casually touch or look at a dress and the salesperson starts following you? From that point on, you are pressed with clothing suggestions, hand-guided to the trial room, and complimented as you try something on, all the way till you step into the payment queue. (Wonder how this works at an AmazonGo store.) And all you wanted was to “look” at a few clothes! And if you really liked something, you would pick it up. If you needed help, you would ask. (Of course, I could be exaggerating, it has been years since many of us went on a shopping trip just for fun. Hopefully, not any more.)

Apparently, by touching or looking at a dress (before the inconspicuous salesperson’s eagle eyes), you have engaged in a “hand-raiser” – you have shown interest in buying. But this is where a huge sea of miscommunication separates the customer and the company/salesperson. The customer, by their own definition, is a “potential” customer and just wants to look. The customer, according to the company, wants to buy and would like to be helpfully nudged till purchase. Clearly, this does not make for an easy customer relationship!

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Digital Customer or Digital Marketing?

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

SEO, influencer marketing, content marketing, social media strategy… these are some of the terms that exemplify popular views of digital marketing. But when trying to comprehend digital marketing, two problems arise: What exactly is “digital” in digital marketing? And does digital marketing include anything beyond digital communication?

In this article, I attempt to answer these questions based on my experience in marketing and digital marketing, experience gained through learning, teaching, and consulting. I also include definitions by researchers and the American Marketing Association, and offer a book suggestion for those interested in learning more.

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The Digital Customer: Differences from the Traditional Customer and Implications for Businesses

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© 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.

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Sharing and Owning: When the Sharing Economy Meets the Digital Economy

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

Recently, I attended a talk by Russell Belk who is arguably the most authoritative figure in research on the relationship between possessions and people. Belk’s work, beginning with his classic paper of 1988 marks the beginning of an era of understanding what our possessions, the objects we own, mean to us, and how they mark our “extended selves.” In this article, I discuss ideas of sharing, owning, the sharing economy of today, and what all of this means for digital goods.

With advances in research, our understanding of possessions gained clarity and became a topic worth studying. Belk has done work on other topics such as materialism, sharing, gift giving, possessions in the digital world, and a variety of cross cultural research. Among all these topics, Belk chose to talk about sharing and materialism, among others. Some of his thoughts are worth repeating, analyzing, and criticizing, hence this article.

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Will New Consumer Habits from the Pandemic Live On? A Reflection

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

For over six months now, the world has been in the grip of a pandemic that has changed our lives to a large extent. As human beings and as consumers, we have learnt new habits that have become essential to the new reality. Will these habits last as the pandemic slowly washes away?

Consider the following situation. A father needs to buy a new laptop so that his daughter, who is in high school, can attend online classes. At any other time, he would have visited a retail store as he is more comfortable asking questions and choosing with the help of the salesperson rather than searching for himself online. But now, most stores are closed and even if they were open, he would not feel safe in the airconditioned store premises. So, for the first time in his life, he decides to buy something as costly as a laptop online. And the experience isn’t all that bad!

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