If you or your clients sell or plan to sell products or services to consumers online, you need to read Now or Never, by Mary Modahl, Vice President of Research for Forrester Research. Based on work Forrester did trying to answer the question of why, when, and how different kinds of people become - or will become - online consumers, the book is an extended white paper on a new kind of market analysis, which Forrester calls technographics. The book's subtitle says it all: "How Companies Must Change Today To Win The Battle For Internet Consumers."
Unlike traditional market research, with its focus on demographic factors such as age, race and gender, technographics measures consumers' attitudes towards technology, which Modahl argues is a far more accurate and compelling predictor of involvement with the Internet and e-commerce than any other measure that has been devised to date. As an example, Modahl offers a comparison between herself and her friend Susan. Each is in her late thirties and has been married for ten years. They are residents of the same suburb in Boston and have children between the ages of three and eight. They went to similar colleges, drive the same kind of car, and their husbands even have similar careers working in finance. To the conventional market researcher, these women would clearly belong in the same category and it would be a no-brainer to conclude they ought to be sold to in the same way. Yet Modahl has been an enthusiastic participant in the Internet economy, while her friend has not. More to the point, Modahl's friend is unlikely to become an online shopper anytime soon.
If you or any of your clients have put up an e-commerce web site, the frustration of trying to figure out what makes one of these women a prospect and the other probably not worth pursuing is something with which you are no doubt already more familiar than you want to be. If you understood, however - and this is the insight upon which the entire theory of technographics is based - that Modahl is a "technology optimist," while Susan is a "technology pessimist," and if you had a framework within which to strategize about that difference - for example, if you knew that 52 percent of the US population are optimists, while the rest are pessimists - figuring out how to make your web site successful might be a much less anxiety-producing process than it has been. On pages 19-21 of her book, Modahl offers precisely the kind of framework I'm talking about, and she shows you how to use it, which alone is probably worth the price of the book.
Technographics is far more complex than I can do justice to here. It takes into account not only consumers' attitudes about technology, but also how those attitudes relate to, among other things, income level and people's motivation for using technology. This last category is extremely interesting for the way it throws light on how it might be possible to use certain kinds of motivation - for example, concern for family - to overcome technology pessimism. Modahl also takes on some of the stickiest issues confronting traditional off-line businesses looking to move into the online space, like how to cope with Internet-channel conflict and how to turn technological change into an energizing catalyst rather than an inertia-engendering process.
Technographics is neither a magic bullet nor a crystal ball, but it does provide some of the best answers I've seen yet to the most difficult and intransigent questions of the Internet economy. It's a book youÕll be glad you've read.
David Stein is president of Automatic On-Line System, a full service web design, marketing and maintenance company. He can be reached at (718) 361-3091 or by e-mail at internetdoctor@autoonline.net.