Watch Your Language! Of Course–But How Do We Actually Do That?

Nothing seems more automatic than speech. We produce an estimated 150 words a minute, and make a mistake only about once every 1,000 words. We stay on track, saying what we intend to, even when other words distract us—from the radio, say, or a road sign we pass while driving.

An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows for the first time why we so rarely speak those irrelevant words: We have a “verbal self-monitor” between the mental production of speech and the actual uttering of words that catches any irrelevant items coming from outside of the speaker.

The study made use of the fact that the self-monitor “cares about context,” and is “especially sensitive” to intercept words that might be inappropriate in a particular social situation, says experimental psychologist Elisah Dhooge, who conducted the study with University of Ghent colleague Robert J. Hartsuiker.

To investigate how this happens, the researchers conducted two experiments, one focusing on the effect of taboo words on speed of speech and the other on accuracy of speech. First, 20 participants were shown a picture on the screen, onto which an irrelevant word appeared, superimposed. Each picture was shown once with a neutral word, once with a taboo one. The word pairs were matched for length and semantic and phonetic relationship to the picture, but neither word was the right label for the picture. The participants were then instructed to name the pictures, not worrying about errors, and were continually encouraged to go faster.

The second experiment was the same, except that now subjects were simply asked to name the picture, trying to be as fast and as accurate as possible.

The results: In Experiment 1, the participants made fewer errors, such as naming the word instead of the picture, with the taboo words than the neutral ones. In Experiment 2, they paused longer before naming the picture with the taboo word superimposed. Their self-monitor, say the authors, was more “stringent” when encountering an offensive word. The monitor, says Dhooge, plays a crucial role in speech. “We are bombarded by irrelevant stimuli constantly. But somehow your system has a way of filtering all that out.” “We have shown that it is the monitor that prevents you from actually saying these words out loud.” We can also thank the speech monitor for saving us from a lot of red-faced moments.

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Watch Your Language! Of Course–But How Do We Actually Do That?

Retail Imperatives For This Year And The Next

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Retail Imperatives For This Year And The Next

What Choice Do We Have?

Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. “When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?” says Krishna Savani of Columbia University. But many people didn’t have a choice about whether to escape New Orleans, and no one knew how bad the disaster would be. “One could say that these individuals made bad choices, but did they really have a choice?” Americans tend to assume that what people do and what happens to them is under their control, is a consequence of their choices, and is their own personal responsibility.

Along with Nicole Stephens of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University, Savani looked at how thinking about choice affected people’s feelings on public policies. For example, in some experiments, participants watched a video of a person doing a set of routine daily activities in an apartment. Some people were told to push the space bar every time he made a choice; others were told to do so every time he touched an object for the first time. They were then asked their opinions on social issues.

Simply thinking about ‘choice’ made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games. Another experiment found that when people think about choice, they are more likely to blame others for bringing bad events on themselves, like having a heart attack or losing a job.

Savani and his colleagues wondered if this was also true for people outside of the U.S., so they tried an experiment in India. After choosing among consumer objects like pens and chocolate bars, both American students and Indian students were shown a photograph of a poor child and given a description of his life. Thinking about choice led Americans to be less empathetic, but had no effect on Indians. “In America, we make choices all the time—in the cafeteria, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall,” Savani says. He wonders if, in the long run, all those consumer choices might have a cumulative negative impact by making people less sympathetic towards others and less concerned about the collective good.

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What Choice Do We Have?

Entertaining vs Effective Advertising

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Entertaining vs Effective Advertising

Linked to Consumer Behaviour

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Linked to Consumer Behaviour

Mobile on the rise in China

Of China's 1.34 billion people, 1.17 billion (87%) now use a fixed line phone, or a mobile phone. The number of mobile users rose nearly 20 million in the first two months of this year, while fixed line telecommunication companies lost 918,000.o

Mobile on the rise in China

What Consumers Want

It´s clear that consumer perceptions of how a company should act within the worlds of social media, are in conflict with the perception of what the average company believe the consumer want...you can download the result of an IBM study by clicking here. In short, companies believe consumers want:

- To learn about new products
- To submit comments 
- To feel connected to the brand
- Basically, very different things- one higher up the funnel and the other lower down. 

But consumers really want:

- To buy
- To get discounts
- To get reviews and information

How about that?

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What Consumers Want

Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You

This is the headline of New York Times Fashion & Style article by Pamela Paul. Has time come to skip the  intrusiveness of calls. Read it by clicking here.o

Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You

The Untapped Power of Smiling

Read the article by Eric Savitz by clicking here.

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The Untapped Power of Smiling

Internet 2011

Watch a larger version by clicking here.o

Internet 2011

Design+Culture a Return to Fundamentalism

Open publication - Free publishing

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Design+Culture a Return to Fundamentalism

Building brands with bricks and mortar

Building brands with bricks and mortar

View more presentations from RetailOasis

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Building brands with bricks and mortar

The Good, Bad and Ugly of Social Media

Asset Protection Conference 2011 -The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Social Media

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The Good, Bad and Ugly of Social Media

M2M: Buying a New Product: When Is It Better to Ask a Novice Rather than an Expert?

If you‟re considering a purchase, you might want to avoid asking an expert‟s advice. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, experts have a hard time recalling product features—especially if they feel they need to explain their logic.

“People tend to assume that knowledge is always a good thing, but our research suggests that in some cases this may not be true,” write authors Ravi Mehta (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), JoAndrea Hoegg (University of British Columbia), and Amitav Chakravarti (New York University).

The researchers evaluated “expert fallibility” in recalling product features and evaluating products. “Our research shows that when the features are not directly comparable, consumer experts accidentally „fill in‟ missing information about the products with information from their prior knowledge,” the authors explain.

Even though some of those false recalls are reasonable assumptions, some of them are not. Novices do not have such prior knowledge, so they can‟t confuse actual recall with the other information stored in their memories.

In four studies, the authors found that experts had a harder time than novices in accurately remembering features of videogame consoles; as a result, the quality of their product judgments was reduced. The authors believe that this is due in part to the experts‟ sense of accountability and responsibility for reporting comparisons to others.

“We showed that experts naturally focus on the steps by which they reached their decision, presumably because they feel they need to explain how they determined which brand was better,” the authors write. “If experts are told that all that matters is the outcome and that they will not be asked about the steps they took to reach it, their false recalls are reduced and their decision quality improves.

“When seeking advice from a consumer expert we suggest that it‟s a good idea to ask them what you should do, but just don‟t ask them why you should do it,” the authors conclude.

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M2M: Buying a New Product: When Is It Better to Ask a Novice Rather than an Expert?

Product Choice: Why Do Consumers Misestimate their Abilities?

Even if you have a grasp on your own abilities, you might have trouble estimating the abilities of others, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. These false impressions affect people’s product choices.

“We’ve known that people overestimate their relative ability for seemingly easy tasks, like driving, and underestimate for difficult tasks,” write authors Andrew D. Gershoff (University of Texas at Austin) and Katherine A. Burson (University of Michigan). The researchers found that people tend to think others are fairly evenly spread out in their abilities and characteristics, even if they are not.

In one study, the researchers asked participants to take a quiz on the subject of tools and hardware. Some took a difficult quiz and others took an easy one. Then participants estimated how many questions they answered correctly. People were fairly good at estimating their own scores.

“However, when participants were asked to estimate how other quiz-takers might have done, they consistently assumed that others’ abilities were more spread out across all possible scores on the test than they actually were,” the authors write. “When asked to estimate how they scored compared to others, they also erred, overestimating their relative knowledge on the easy quiz and underestimating on the difficult quiz.”

This phenomenon can affect product choices because consumers often choose products by considering their relative position in the market. “Thus when a consumer finds that she knows very few of the types of hammers, she assumes she is in the minority with other people knowing more than her, and she estimates that she has below-average knowledge, and purchases accordingly,” the authors write. In fact, participants who took the difficult quiz in the study thought they knew less compared to others than they actually did. And they went on to prefer less advanced tools, classes, and do-it-yourself projects.

In another experiment, participants took an easy quiz about photography. Then they read quotes from others indicating that they had also found the quiz easy. This feedback increased the participants’ estimates of the number of others who scored well on the quiz. “The results indicate that marketers have a fairly straightforward method of improving customers’ choices,” the authors conclude.

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Product Choice: Why Do Consumers Misestimate their Abilities?

On Names 2: Does Your Name Dictate Your Life Choices?

What’s in a name? Letters. And psychologists have posited that the letters—particularly the first letter of our names—can influence decisions, including whom we marry and where we move. The effect is called “implicit egotism.”

In 2008, two Belgian researchers found that workers in their country were more likely to choose a workplace if the first letter of its name matched their own.

A commentary published in and upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, revisited the study with similar U.S. data and found that the Belgians got the cause and effect exactly backwards. And that might make us more skeptical about the effects of implicit egotism.

“Walt Disney worked for a company starting with D not because of an unconscious attraction to that letter,” writes University of Pennsylvania associate professor Uri Simonsohn, “but because he so christened it.”

Simonsohn analyzed records of political donations made during the 2004 campaigns, which include donors’ names and employers. Like the Belgians, he found that the first initials matched. But then he compared those first-letter matches with matches of the first three letters—which more accurately reflect the actual names of both the people and the firms.

Analyzing the two side by side, he found that the effect of the one-letter match dropped away—while the three-letter sharing increased the match of person to company a striking 64-fold. Why? Because many people work at firms they named or at those founded by their grandfathers or brothers.

Simonsohn doesn’t discount implicit egotism altogether. “Having young children, I can’t imagine people don’t like their own letter more than other letters,” he says. But letter preference is more likely to influence decisions about which you are “indifferent or ignorant”—say, choosing a wine or even a mutual fund you know nothing about.

“Not that it makes no difference—but the differences it makes in really big decisions are probably slim,” Simonsohn continues. There, the first letter of the organization’s name is but “one unit of difference.” When you’re thinking about where to work or whom to marry, “there are thousands of units to consider.”

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On Names 2: Does Your Name Dictate Your Life Choices?

On Names 1: What Does Signing Your Name Mean in the Marketplace?

Signing your name on the dotted line heightens your sense of self and leads to purchase behavior that affirms your self-identity, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But signing can reduce engagement in consumers who don’t identify strongly with a product or category.

“Although there are numerous ways in which people may present their identity to others, signing one’s name has distinct legal, social, and economic implications,” write authors Keri L. Kettle and Gerald Häubl (University of Alberta). The act of signing also has implications in the marketplace.

In one experiment, consumers were asked to either sign or print their name (in an ostensibly unrelated task) before visiting a sporting goods store to purchase a pair of running shoes. “For consumers who closely associate their identity with running, compared to printing their name, providing their signature before entering the store caused an increase in the number of running shoes they tried on and in the amount of time they spent in the store,” the authors write. Signing their name had the opposite effect on people who did not associate their identity with running; they spent less time in the store and tried on fewer shoes.

In another study, consumers were asked to make a series of product choices after either signing or printing their names. Consumers who signed were more likely to choose an option that was popular with a social group they belong to. The tendency was stronger when consumers chose in a product category that signaled their identity to others (a jacket) than when they selected in a category that does not signal their identity (toothpaste).

The study has implications for retailers and consumers, the authors explain. For instance, a retailer might ask shoppers to sign their names after completing a survey, to enter a prize drawing, or enroll in a loyalty program, since it is likely to lead consumers who identify closely with the stores’ products to become more engaged. “However, such signature interventions should be used cautiously, as signing tends to reduce engagement in consumers who lack such identification.

“Although a signature does not necessarily imply commitment, it does always represent one’s identity. Because consumers sign (or can be asked to do so) in many consumption contexts, it is important to develop a deeper understanding of how producing one’s signature influences behavior,” the authors conclude.

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On Names 1: What Does Signing Your Name Mean in the Marketplace?

The Hidden Risks of Opting for the Familiar

When people are under pressure, they often try to surround themselves with things that are familiar. A study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this is true even when the familiar choice is the worst choice and amplifies the pressure.

The research was inspired by an iPhone app that displays nearby taxis on a map and also lets you rate them. Ab Litt, a graduate student in marketing at Stanford University, wondered if people who saw a cab they’d rated highly before would choose that cab even if another one was closer—and whether that choice would change if they were in a hurry. So along with Taly Reich, Senia Maymin, and Baba Shiv, he designed experiments to look at the choices people make when they are under pressure.

In one experiment, people played a game called Math Tower, but the game was not supposed to be fun. To play the game, people had to start with a number, then do a list of mathematical operations in a row—divide by seven, multiply by six, add 15—and the computer would tell them when they messed up. “The game was awful. It was boring, it was unpleasant, and it was hard,” Litt says. You’d think people who had played it would want to avoid it.

However, people were then given a choice between what games to play next. They could either play Puzzle Castle, which had a logo similar to Math Tower’s, or Word Forest, which had a different logo. They were also told they couldn’t make as many points on Puzzle Castle.

People who were under pressure—those who were told they had to make a certain number of points in order to have a chance at winning a $50 gift card—were more likely to pick the game with a logo that resembled the logo of Math Tower, even though they’d just had a miserable time playing that game. “When there was the familiar logo, people’s decisions were distorted toward choosing an option that was actually worse,” Litt says. People who saw a different set of options, where neither logo looked like the dreaded Math Tower, chose better and were more likely to pick the game that could give them more points.

So how do you avoid falling into a trap where you choose familiarity over the best option? Litt suggests thinking beyond your gut feeling may be the solution.”If you ask people to think about which options are actually better, this could cause them to focus more on the objective evidence they have rather than the comfort they feel.”

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The Hidden Risks of Opting for the Familiar

Marketing Roundtable

March 2011 - Marketing Roundtable - Jim Hume

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Marketing Roundtable

Shopping Reinvented: Next Generation Apparel Retailing

Shopping Reinvented: Next Generation Apparel Retailing

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Shopping Reinvented: Next Generation Apparel Retailing

More Reasons to Be Nice: It’s Less Work for Everyone

A polite act shows respect. But a new study of a common etiquette—holding a door for someone—suggests that courtesy may have a more practical, though unconscious, shared motivation: to reduce the work for those involved. The research, by Joseph P. Santamaria and David A. Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University, is the first to combine two fields of study ordinarily considered unrelated: altruism and motor control. It is to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“The way etiquette has been viewed by Emily Post—that you’re being proper by following social codes—is undoubtedly part of it,” said psychology professor Rosenbaum. “Our insight is there is another contributor: the mental representation of other people’s physical effort. Substantial research in the field of motor control shows that people are good at estimating how much effort they and others

expend,” Rosenbaum continued. “We realized that this concept could be extended to a shared-effort model of politeness.”

The researchers videotaped people approaching and passing through the door of a university building.  The tapes were analyzed for the relationships among several behaviors: Did the first person hold the

door for a follower or followers and for how long? How did the likelihood of holding the door depend on the distance between the first person at the door and whomever followed?

“The most important result,” Rosenbaum said, “was that when someone reached the door and two people followed, the first person at the door held the door longer than if only one person followed. The internal calculation on the part of the first arriver was, ‘My altruism will benefit more people, so I’ll hold the door longer.’”

Another finding: the followers who noticed the door-holder hastened their steps, helping to “fulfill the implicit pact” between themselves and the opener “to keep their joint effort below the sum of their individual door-opening efforts,” the authors write.

A more common explanation of why we extend a physical gesture of courtesy is what the researchers term the “critical distance” model: we do something for someone if she is simply near enough. But the researchers found that model insufficient. “We need a way of describing why there is a change of probability” both of doing the task and of expending more time at it, said Rosenbaum. Is the critical distance 10 feet? Why not 50 feet? What is “near enough?” And why wait longer if more people are following? “You still come back to the question of what the individuals are trying to achieve.”

Rosenbaum sees the shared-effort model as enhancing, not detracting from, our appreciation of good manners: “Here are people who will probably never see each other again,” he says, “but in this fleeting interaction, they reduce each others’ effort. This small gesture is uplifting for society.”

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More Reasons to Be Nice: It’s Less Work for Everyone

What You See is What You Do: Risky Behaviors Linked to Risk-Glorifying Media Exposure

Exposure via the media to activities such as street racing, binge drinking and unprotected sex is linked to risk-taking behaviors and attitudes, according to a new analysis of more than 25 years of research.

The connection between risk taking and risk-glorifying media – such as video games, movies, advertising, television and music –  was found across differing research methods, media formats and various forms of risky behaviors, according to an article published online in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association. The effects are likely to occur both short- and long-term, while increased exposure is likely to be associated with increased risk taking, according to the study’s lead author, Peter Fischer, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

“It appears from our meta-analysis that risk-glorifying media has potentially grave consequences, such as innumerable incidences of fatalities, injuries and high economic costs in a broad variety of risk-taking domains, such as substance abuse, reckless driving, gambling and risky sexual behavior,” wrote Fischer. 

Among the media examined, video games that glorify risk were more likely to prompt dangerous behavior than passive exposure, such as watching films or listening to music. The authors examined research conducted between 1983 and 2009 in the United States and Europe, incorporating more than 80,000 participants. Most people were between the ages of 16 and 24, but some of the samples did include older and younger participants.

An analysis of this size helps prove that exposure to risk-glorifying media actually leads to riskier behavior, which was exemplified in several experiments, the authors said. For example, in a typical experiment, participants were first exposed to media content that either glorified risk taking – such as pictures of extreme sports or street racing video games – or did not glorify such behavior. Afterward, the researchers measured how willing the participants were to engage in certain types of risky behaviors, such as participating in extreme sports or reckless driving, measured in a computer simulation.

One study of 961 young adults found that those who watched movies showing people drinking were more likely to drink more and have alcohol-related problems later in life. Similar effects were found in other studies of smoking.

“These results support recent lines of research into the relationship between risk taking and the media,” said Fischer. “There is indeed a reliable connection between exposure to risk-glorifying media content and risk-taking behaviors, cognitions and emotions.”

Read the full article by clicking here.

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What You See is What You Do: Risky Behaviors Linked to Risk-Glorifying Media Exposure

The Past, Present and Future of Great Ideas

The Past, Present and Future of Great Ideas

View more presentations from Edward Cotton

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The Past, Present and Future of Great Ideas

Don´t Get Lost in Consumer Insights...

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Don´t Get Lost in Consumer Insights...

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley: “Stop Sketching, Start Building”

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Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley: “Stop Sketching, Start Building”

2011 Trends

SIGHTINGS A Look Forward: 11 Trends for 2011

View more documents from BrandSquare

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2011 Trends

FMCG Social Media Strategies

Top 10 FMCG brands and their social media strategies

View more presentations from Clo Willaerts

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FMCG Social Media Strategies

Interactive Window Shopping

22, Rue de la Paix - La Vitrine from Marcel on Vimeo.o

Interactive Window Shopping

More Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail In US And Western Europe

Online retail in both the US and Western Europe will continue on a double-digit growth trajectory over the next five years, according to two new forecasts released today by Forrester Research, Inc. Both US and European online retail will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015. The forecasts include business-to-consumer sales excluding travel and financial services. The European forecast encompasses 17 Western European nations and includes a category-by-category breakdown of online retail across these markets.
"The online retail market in both the US and Western Europe remains strong, despite the challenging economy," said Forrester Vice President and Research Director Patti Freeman Evans. "In fact, with consumer purchasing behavior returning to normal, US web sales in 2010 actually accelerated over 2009 compared with the prior year, growing 12.6 percent. In Europe, very strong growth in 2010 was fueled by new online buyers and higher spend per capita on the demand side, as well as the launch of transactional websites by established offline players."



Retailers are supporting consumers' increasing use of the Web in the US, helping to drive growth with new business models, such as flash sales and group buying, as well as improved merchandising to provide a broad selection of products available online. However, this growth comes at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores, as consumers increasingly spend on the Web, especially during critical shopping days such as Cyber Monday.


In Western Europe, the online retail market grew 18 percent from 2009 to 2010 and is projected to grow 13 percent from 2010 to 2011, but growth rates will then slow as the market matures and buyer penetration begins to level off. By 2015, 68 percent of online adults will have made a purchase online; however, northern European countries will see 80 percent or more of their online population buying on the web, versus less than 50 percent in southern countries.


"Forrester's US and Western Europe online retail forecasts, in conjunction with the previously released Asia Pacific online retail forecasts and the upcoming Latin America online retail forecast, demonstrate Forrester’s global forecasting abilities," said Vice President and Practice Leader of Forrester’s Market Insights team Jill Chiara. "Together, these Forecasts provide a robust view of the global retail customer, helping companies worldwide to strategize for current and future retail markets."o

More Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail In US And Western Europe

Full Bladder, Better Decisions? Controlling Your Bladder Decreases Impulsive Choices

What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst—psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.

Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder—the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.

The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.

“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.

The results were a little surprising from a theoretical point of view; a lot of research in psychology has supported the concept of “ego depletion”—that having to restrain yourself wears out your brain and makes it harder to exert self-control over something else. But Tuk says this seems to work in a different way, maybe because bladder control is largely an automatic, unconscious process.

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Full Bladder, Better Decisions? Controlling Your Bladder Decreases Impulsive Choices

Paying the Price for Recession

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Paying the Price for Recession

More Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail In US And Western Europe

Online retail in both the US and Western Europe will continue on a double-digit growth trajectory over the next five years, according to two new forecasts released today by Forrester Research, Inc. Both US and European online retail will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015. The forecasts include business-to-consumer sales excluding travel and financial services. The European forecast encompasses 17 Western European nations and includes a category-by-category breakdown of online retail across these markets.
"The online retail market in both the US and Western Europe remains strong, despite the challenging economy," said Forrester Vice President and Research Director Patti Freeman Evans. "In fact, with consumer purchasing behavior returning to normal, US web sales in 2010 actually accelerated over 2009 compared with the prior year, growing 12.6 percent. In Europe, very strong growth in 2010 was fueled by new online buyers and higher spend per capita on the demand side, as well as the launch of transactional websites by established offline players."



Retailers are supporting consumers' increasing use of the Web in the US, helping to drive growth with new business models, such as flash sales and group buying, as well as improved merchandising to provide a broad selection of products available online. However, this growth comes at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores, as consumers increasingly spend on the Web, especially during critical shopping days such as Cyber Monday.


In Western Europe, the online retail market grew 18 percent from 2009 to 2010 and is projected to grow 13 percent from 2010 to 2011, but growth rates will then slow as the market matures and buyer penetration begins to level off. By 2015, 68 percent of online adults will have made a purchase online; however, northern European countries will see 80 percent or more of their online population buying on the web, versus less than 50 percent in southern countries.
"Forrester's US and Western Europe online retail forecasts, in conjunction with the previously released Asia Pacific online retail forecasts and the upcoming Latin America online retail forecast, demonstrate Forrester’s global forecasting abilities," said Vice President and Practice Leader of Forrester’s Market Insights team Jill Chiara. "Together, these Forecasts provide a robust view of the global retail customer, helping companies worldwide to strategize for current and future retail markets."o

More Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail In US And Western Europe