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I started out doing very traditional research, looking
at how consumers behave in traditional retail settings.
So when they go into a store how they respond to marketing
stimuli like prices, advertising, displays and
things like that.
How do they make the brain choices that they do?
How do they consume products?
How do they choose among different retailers?
So really essentially problems of choice and in very
traditional settings.
And then I would say, perhaps in the last four or five
years, I've now got really interested in internet
retailing and how people connect over the internet,
people connect from different communities.
Because I think a traditional retailing you face two
constraints.
So constraint number one is once you locate a store in a
certain region you've really defined you're trading area.
So retailing we always used to say location, location,
location is very important.
Nobody is driving from New York City to Philadelphia to
do their supermarket shopping.
So that's the first constraint.
The second constraint you face is the constraint of what kind
of products you can offer on the shelf.
You have a fixed amount of space and so you have to
really carry stuff that's popular.
So what's interesting about the internet is both of those
constraints are now gone.
So if I'm diapers.com I can sell diapers to people in
Texas, in California, in New York simultaneously.
How does that change things?
If I'm diapers.com maybe I can offer a far greater assortment
of diaper products than any one local supermarket could
also offer.
So those are really the two changes going into that world
that I became interested in.
The first thing that's interesting is how the
consumers actually relate to each other.
And so I'm very , very interested to see how
consumers start conversations about particular products,
about particular services, about particular environments.
And then the second thing I think is interesting is the
relationship between how they sit virtually and how sit
physically.
So, for example, if people propagate word of mouth,
potentially I could send you an email if I'm in Los Angeles
and you're in New York.
But maybe when I propagate word of mouth I just talk to
my friends who live within the same few blocks that I live in
Los Angeles.
So it's very, very interesting to me how this physical world
and the virtual world to what extent do they overlap and how
do they reinforce each other.
One of the implications is if you want to create word of
mouth which has the endogenous feedback, like once it gets
going it starts to sort of build on itself.
You probably want to try and identify physical communities
that have properties that are conducive to word of mouth.
So maybe you need people who live densely closely together.
Or maybe you want to go into a community where there's a lot
of so-called social capital meaning that people meet each
other at the tennis club, they go to church together, they
drink at the same bar.
So places where people have connection.
Whereas if you want to contact people living in more rural or
more spread out kind of environments, maybe the way
you reach them is through keyword search and
other kinds of tools.
So I think using the physical characteristics of the
community to identify places that the more conducive to
word of mouth versus other tools.