'Key is understanding why
people come to the web'

Needs differ by how long they have surfed

By Jeremy Schlosberg
chatting with Bernadette Tracy

    Not very well. And it think it has to do with the fact that when it comes to the internet it seems that everybody is obsessed with numbers: unique visitors, CPMs, hit rates, click-through rates. 
     But the real key that the media and marketing world is missing in my opinion is looking inside the heads and the homes of the online users to get a more qualitative rather than a quantitative view of the real people who are driving the numbers. 
    Everyone’s trying to develop some kind of effective media strategy and marketing strategies, but all that’s happening is they’re bombarded with numbers. They’re looking at demographics, they’re looking at psychographics, but none of these categories—whether you’re talking about income or age or whether someone is an early adopter or a technophobe—none of these things will help you understand people’s behavior on the internet, or project what people are going to be doing on the internet in the future.

    Well, I am a psychologist and a researcher and I spent a fortune early on trying to find a statistical model that would predict where the internet is going to be heading three years down the road. And I finally had the "a-ha!" reaction, which was so simple it stunned me. 
    It turns out that the most accurate predictive model is simple: it’s length of time online. And what we developed in ’97 was a very simple predictive model that tells you for certain, like a crystal ball, what’s going to happen three years into the future. It’s as simple as length of time online. 
    We developed three proven predictive categories, which are the newbies, who have been online for under a year, the integrators, who have been online for one to two years, and the trendsetters, who have been online three plus years.
    You cannot lump these people together across groups. Newbies, integrators and trendsetters have different motivations and different mindsets at each stage.

    We started this in 1996, and that first year, based on the trendsetters, we accurately predicted the explosion in e-commerce for the 1999 holiday season. In 1997 we forecasted the explosion of women on the internet. In 1998 we predicted the widespread popularity of online investing, which is really only just starting; it’s going to come into full bloom in 2001.
    In 1999 we are forecasting an explosion in online banking by 2002 and now in 2000 we’re predicting that women by 2003 will outnumber men online 3 to 2. And this is all because of the simple fact that in three years newbies evolve into trendsetters.
    I have to say that in twenty years in business I have never seen such an accelerated adoption curve for a new technology. 
    What’s driving this is also simple: it’s the state of American life today and how little time people feel they have. People barely have time to breathe, much less get done the things they have to get done in their daily lives.
     Now, I’ve been studying emerging trends in technology for a long time, and what I have found is convenience always wins out. Give people something that’s going to save then time and they’re with you. At the beginning they may be insecure, but if the time-saving benefit is there, they’re going to go for it.

    At first they’re very enthusiastic but overwhelmed with the options. They have no particular goal in mind when they go online, they’re just trying to have fun. They surf all over the place, just going anywhere, randomly, to see what’s there.
    But after five or six months of this they settle down and begin to see the value of the internet in their daily lives. And they begin the evolution from newbie to integrator, which is complete after about a year. That’s when they really start integrating the internet into their lives. They might go online to get medical advice. And this is when they tend to become online shoppers, usually by starting with a very low-ticket item. 
    Then they’re getting stock quotes, checking the weather, researching cars, researching appliances, looking for cheap airline tickets. They’re hooked.
    But then it takes them about another year or so to master how to use the internet efficiently. This is when they start bookmarking sites, and these are usually the sites that are the easiest to navigate, or that have the most relevant information, or that offer personalized repeat visits. These become their bookmarks.

      Once people have a bookmark it is almost impossible to get them off that bookmark and bookmark a competitive site. This is true not only of e-commerce sites but of the media sites—TV sites, newspaper sites, magazine sites. Once users have a bookmark in a category you have to move heaven and earth to get them to consider an alternative.
     This is partly because it just takes too much time--the sites that they’re on already own their information and they don’t want to have to reenter it on another site. But also as we know, we’re simply creatures of habit, so if something isn’t broken, why fix it?

    When you’re going to a web site to make a media buy, you should be looking at your objective and trying to determine what proportion of audience is newbies. Don’t just look at the number of hits. Because newbies give you a ground floor opportunity to begin to develop a lifelong customer. 
    What advertisers have to do with both their offline and online advertising is focus not on the brilliance of their campaign but on assuring people of a user-friendly experience when they’re online—not only on the advertiser’s own web site but, by extension, on the web sites where the ads are placed.

    No, not at all. There are two key points here.
     First of all, yes, you have to reach the newbies. For web sites in particular it’s critical to reach people during the first year they’re online because by the time they become trendsetters it’s too late. 
    Plus, word-of-mouth is important for newbies. My research shows that 59 percent of newbies find out about new web sites through word of mouth, versus 43 percent of trendsetters. This is another good reason to target newbies.
    But then there’s the second point, which is that trendsetters give you a crystal ball for the future. If you look at the behavior of the trendsetters today you get a lot of insight into discovering what’s going to happen in 2003. We’ll go into more detail about this in future articles.

    The integrators are halfway between; they’re in the process of integrating the internet into their lives. So there’s still an opportunity to target them. I’ll reiterate that the ideal time to get onto an online user’s radar screen and capture his or her loyalty is at the newbie stage. 
      Lacking that, you still have an opportunity at the integrator stage. The newbies are the window of opportunity, and the window is wide open at that point. When they become integrators the window is still half open, but it’s also half closed. By the time they’re trendsetters there’s probably just a little crack left open.

     No. But there are only certain kinds of things the trendsetters are going to be open to. That’s why the windows is open just a crack. For something that’s a basic bread-and-butter product or service, your best market is the newbies and to a lesser extent the integrators. 
    The trendsetters are, however, always on the lookout for the latest and greatest. So this is the one and only way you’re going to grab their attention—either with technological breakthroughs or the latest in lifestyle trends.

    Sure they’re different kinds of people, in a way. We know that as the internet evolves, it’s going to become more and more downscale and mainstream. But even so, we’re still looking at the internet as a information delivery medium. 
    And so I don’t care if you’re talking about the CEO of Schwab or my sister Cathy; at one point in time, they were newbies trying to navigate through this overwhelming sea of information.
     Everyone has to go through this evolutionary technological adoption curve, everyone when they first get online has learn how to get around. It’s like going into a new town. If you’ve lived there 10 years, you know where everything is, but when you first get there, you need street signs and guideposts. That said, it’s of course a lot easier when it’s laid out in a grid rather than winding streets with a lot of dead ends.

    Well, I disagree with any projections that claim that the number of newbies will slow down. Sure, as a percentage of overall online users the number is getting smaller but in actual numbers of people newbies continue to come online in a constant stream. I think the internet is going to be as common as a telephone.
   If you think about the telephone, it’s worth remembering that at some point in time only 50 percent of Americans had telephones. And I’m sure if we were to have read the newspapers in those days, they would have said exactly the same thing, that nobody’s going to buy more telephones, that everyone who’s going to buy one has bought one. 
    With the internet we’re so obsessed with the technology that we forget to look at history. We get carried away thinking that this is some weird kind of technological miracle and what it is is a communication and information device.
   And you know what? The key to this whole thing isn’t about the technology at all, or wondering about what breakthroughs are just around the corner. Instead, the key is to think carefully about the role the internet plays in people’s lives. 
   Will it be like the microwave, where most people use it to warm up coffee? I think the answer is obvious, that the internet will play a very important role in people’s lives. 
     The bigger question that remains in my own mind relates to how the computer and the television will evolve. Will PCs become more like TVs? Or will TVs become more like PCs. For the answer, well, we have to all stay tuned.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media. 
-Bernadette Tracy, a respected authority on the internet, is founder and president of NetSmartAmerica.com  (http://www.netsmartamerica.com) an online consumer motivational research firm that specializes in spotting emerging trends. She appears every Friday in the pages of Media Life. 

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