On Wednesday, July 8th, American Public University System, an accredited higher-education institution offering undergraduate and graduate degrees online, hosted hundreds of prospective students in a cutting-edge virtual environment.
It's long been a conventional wisdom of consumer product marketers that "supermarkets are places of high impulse buying -- fully 60 to 70 percent of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us." So said psychologist and market researcher Paco Underhill in his 1999 book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. In a newly published research paper, AI senior partner David Bell and two colleagues challenge this long-held view, uncovering evidence that far fewer of grocery shoppers' purchases are impulsive and, further, that impulsive shopping is driven less by in-store merchandising and more by traits of the individual purchaser. The research will cause many marketers to reconsider their approaches to marketing grocery-store products from toothpaste to tomato sauce.
While Americans bought almost $130 billion worth of goods and services from online retailers like Amazon, that figure still comprises only about four percent of the nation's retail sales.
A number of innovators, though, are finding other compelling ways to monetize internet ventures.
The link between product demand and pricing magnitude is intuitive and a fundamental tenet of economics. Less intuitive, but also important, is the link between pricing policy, product consumption, and customer retention.
According to Charlene Yi, in Groundswell, recommended to me and AI by a friend, Wally Boston, the need for more and new ’Web 2.0’ platforms built to serve the older American demographic is questionable. With the wave of Boomer retirement still far from over - and online habits of the segment far from established - how can this be so?
MIT professors have done some great research to show that 'net promoter score,' a popular mechanism for evaluating customer satisfaction, is correlated with profitability.