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 COLUMN
Men and women: Online, we should be more than markets AN OLD RETAILING adage has it that women shop and men buy.
The NRF released its survey results earlier this month in anticipation of its trade show, NRF.com, which will take place this week in Philadelphia. I'll be speaking on a panel at NRF.com on Wednesday, Sept. 29, the final day of the conference. (If you miss this week's conference, you can still catch me Oct. 8 at Fall Internet World in New York. In my session, titled "The Web in 2004: What Won't Be," I'll debunk such persistent Internet myths as banner advertising, online banking, the coming broadband utopia, and digital Darwinism.) Among the NRF study's findings is the discovery that twice as many people -- 70 percent of those with Internet access -- have visited electronic-commerce sites than have actually purchased items from those sites -- 35 percent. Most people are still more comfortable buying things from brick-and-mortar outlets than from Web sites. One reason is that with a physical store, you at least have someone to yell at if things go wrong. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed said they like being able to return purchases in person. This may give brick-and-mortar retailers an edge on the Internet: You could order a pair of shoes online and then, if they don't fit, return them at the local mall. As with any statistical study, the results of the NRF's research are open to interpretation. Maybe men are buying more things online because men have been online longer, on the average, than females. It's only recently, after all, that the gender gap has started to narrow online. As it continues to narrow, that 10 percent difference may disappear. With it, so too may old stereotypes about male and female behavior -- and, perhaps, the usefulness of demographic studies. Demographics could be defined as the science of making generalizations. It's often little more than legitimized stereotyping. This kind of research is most valuable when you know nothing about your customers. Rather than keep track of customers' individual desires, surveys let companies define "markets" and deliver advertising "messages" en masse to those markets. This approach to selling arose with the advent of mass media: radio and television. However, on the Internet, it's possible to know each customer individually -- or at least to give the appearance of doing so -- through the use of personalization technologies. That should spell the death of demographics, if merchants can wean themselves from reliance on its statistical crutches. For more on personalization, check out www.personalization.com, a site sponsored by Net Perceptions and edited by Internet-marketing pundit Christopher Locke. Although Net Perceptions makes personalization software, the site aims to be vendor-neutral, and it's a good first stop for learning about the state of the personalization arts. Does the Internet make demographics defunct, or is there still a place for surveys? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com. Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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