What New Customer Behaviors Have Emerged in a Multi-Media, Multi-Screen and Multi-Channel Marketing Environment?

Decision makers are more influenced by information reaching them through social network than when received directly from sellers. The advancement of interactive and other communication technologies makes the speed at which market information is collected and acted upon faster and faster. In an emergent marketing environment of multi-media, multi-screen and multi-channel, the way people get in touch with information is changing, resulting in new customer behaviors.

Multi-channel and Multi-media

Customers who face multi-channel and multi-media environments when making decision frequently use different media and channels at different stages of their decision-making and purchase process. They tend to select a specific channel in one stage and then migrate to another channel in another stage. Take my old company business _ providing customized IT training courses to university students and business customers _ as an example, many students look to the internet for courses and company brief information, to their classmates for advice, to internet forum for courses quality review, to telephones for placing customized and complex orders, and to face-to-face meeting for pricing and other details.

With the availability of new channels, customer channel choice is not static but changes over time. There are more and more people migrating from offline to online channel for many product or service categories such as airline tickets, books, smartphones, and even education services. In the U.S., Forrester Research shows that $248.7 billion online sales are expected by 2014 and a compounded growth of 10% is forecast for the next five years. In Western Europe sales are expected to reach $155.7 billion, a growth of 11% annually. And more importantly, 82% of U.S. online customers are satisfied with buying experiences that began and ended with the online store while satisfaction drops to 61% when they research online and then buy in a store.1

With the advancement of multi-media...