Multichannel is now a firmly accepted way to purchase for most UK shoppers, according to a recent study commissioned by Melbourne IT DBS. The poll, carried out by YouGov for the digital brand specialist, questioned more than 2,000 UK consumers, and found that 60 per cent of Britons now shop online at least once a month, while 77 per cent research products on the high street before going online to find a better price.
However, with the progress comes a number of pitfalls many brands are still failing to overcome. The report also suggests that consumer who research offline before going online find it easy to get lost or distracted in their search for a product. To tackle this, new '.brand' names could be released, to create an official domain for a well-known product.
Many of us are also getting distracted on our searches for a specific product, with 52 per cent of those questioned admitting they ended up on a different website from the one they intended to visit. While 25 per cent said they remembered the web address they had seen advertised said they went straight to a company website, 60 per cent used a search engine to try and find the product instead and often got sidetracked along the way. It is at this cross roads many well-known house hold names such as Currys or Argos could lose out- when the consumer's attention is diverted by a competitor's or even a counterfeit website, the value of the original promotion or advertisement is lost.
Stuart Durham, Melbourne IT DBS' European sales director, said: "If brands can strengthen the direct link between their offline marketing spend and their online stores to increase the number of consumers going straight to their sites, it could make a big difference to revenue. Simple, memorable, branded internet domain names that allow consumers to bypass the search engines and go direct to the site would deliver that benefit."
Another big issue for online consumers is trust. Of those questioned, 51 per cent said it was difficult to differentiate between websites selling genuine goods and fake items, while 83 per cent said online brands should take action to help consumers tell the difference. The good news, according to Durham, is that brands will soon be able to apply for their own product or company name as a domain name, for instance, jeans.levis.
"A .brand has the potential to create significant benefits for marketers, " Durham said, "including memorable domains for increased direct navigation by consumers, shorter domains for mobile web users, and an indisputable mark of trust for those consumers looking for reassurance they are buying authentic goods online."
Speaking to press recently, Jonathan Freeman, senior lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths University of London, has been studying online consumer behaviour for more than a decade. He said: "Brand based domain names provide a much more direct index and, as a result, they should be much easier for consumers to remember.
"I imagine the concept should be very attractive to brand owners who want consumers to use their web address. Using the new approach will make direct access to websites feel as intuitive and natural as typing the company or product name into a search engine, but with the benefit that consumers will know exactly where they will get to."
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