pic credit: sheebamagazine
I ran a survey with my friends asking them what drives them to shop online. Jayashree said " time, convenience, efforts and cost", Roshan said "cost, comfort, and buying many things at a time as you can see them in a single go", Anamika said "need and laziness".
Do you see the common sentiment running in all the responses?
This is how easy life is with ecommerce. In India shopping online is at 120 million as of today and is estimated to double by 2025.
So what do people buy online , well let me not list the mundane things like food, grocery and clothes but now people also have SWAP forums which is the new barter system to exchange old/unused items to promote sustainability. These days shopping is not just on the web but also in Watzapp. With the screen getting smaller and options becoming wider ecommerce has taken a huge leap in today's times.
With such huge demand it would be interesting to study consumer behavior and how it is set to evolve with changing times.
With technology fast becoming a part of our lives its time we now study how it shapes not just our preferences but also behaviour and culture.
Online shopping behaviour analysis deals with buyers and how they buy online, what holds their attention, what confuses them and how they navigate stores? They also capture demographic trends, predominant emotions expressed so on and so forth.
Imagine someone studying your eye movement ,time you spend on scrolling, screen presence on an item/site. Now you know how they watch? Not just that they also analyze data and create customer segmentation. As shopify states"Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics so companies can market to each group effectively and appropriately".
There is another term called Market Segmentation. As Qualtrics puts it "Market segmentation is the research that determines how your organisation divides its customers or cohort into smaller groups based on characteristics such as, age, income, personality traits or behaviour. These segments can later be used to optimise products and advertising to different customers."
See there is so much study going on about all of us and how they slice and dice us in data to later advertise and as Roshan says above "make us buy stuff we may not necessarily need".
Typically psychology and advertising go hand in hand. There is stream called Behaviourism in psychology heavily used by the advertising industry.
Behaviorism “assumes that behavior is observable and can be correlated with other observable events. Thus, there are events that precede and follow behavior”
As stated on the loyoladigitalmedia site "advertisers realized the best way to manipulate consumers was through their emotions. Ads that make the consumer feel fear, anger, happiness, love, or almost any emotion will force him or her to formulate an opinion on the product being advertised."
Did this strike a chord with you? did this trigger sadness in you. If yes , then the ad stimulated an emotion in your mind err..consumer !!!!
It is extremely important to understand how our behaviour can be manipulated and how important psychology is playing a part in all this.
With the advent of artificial intelligence the importance of cognitive abilities is fast increasing leading to another new term called cognitive psychology.
So you see the future lies in cyber psychology ,and while creating this article I came across another term psychology of artificial intelligence.
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