Offline vs Online Branding - 2

It’s important to remember that the company website offers a better understanding of customer behavior than other traditional brand touch-points. Reicheld and Schefter (2000) mentioned that while the Internet may seem like an anonymous space, in reality it is far easier to track customers, their purchase histories, and their preferences online than in a traditional business setting. Customers in bricks-and-mortar stores leave no record of their behavior unless they buy something – even then, the data are often sketchy. But in virtual stores, their shopping patterns are transparent. Every move they make can be documented, click by click. If a customer exits a website when the price screen appears, it’s a fair bet that he’s price sensitive. If he jumps from page to page without ever initiating a transaction, he’s probably frustrated at being unable to find what he wants.

According to Miniwatts Marketing Group data (2008), internet users all over the world dispersed like the Figure 1 below. Not surprisingly Asia has the most users (530 millions) and Australia has the least users (19 millions).




Figure 1: Worldwide internet users by region
Source: World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Table 1 displays the population, number of internet users and usage growth from 2000 to 2008 statistics for every region. Table stats show that 56.6% of all world citizens are living in Asia. Since the population of Asia is far more than other regions most internet users are living in Asia (37.6%). However, the internet penetration of Asia is 14.0% which just higher than that of Africa (5.3%) only. North America has the biggest population penetration ratio to internet (73.1), which means that every seven people from ten can reach internet.




Source: World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

The figure and table above show the internet usage and world population statistics by regions. If the usage growth from year 2000 to today is investigated it can be seen that number of people who can reach internet nearly tripled. This is an important and clear message about how important the online branding is.