Marketing Confusion

My wife and I decided last week that we wanted to buy a digital camera. The only digital camera I have experience with is a 3 year old walmart special that my father-in-law bought for Jennette. It has worked ok at times, but failed us in a trip to London.

I did my research online, found the camera that fit into what I wanted and went to Circuit City to make a purchase. But the rebate for a free photo printer was only available online. Strange, huh? So Jennette and I got back in the car, went to my office, bought the camera online, went back to the store, picked up our camera and now we have our new toy. This didn't bother me at all, but Circuit City has some confusing marketing. Do they only want me to shop online? Their website banner ad says otherwise, they are opening 65 new stores in the next couple of months.


My take away from the experience: Traditional brink-and-mortar stores get confused with how I (and many of my friends) shop and how to market to these new buyers. Web 2.0 seems to have some of them confused. So here is some insight into how I shop.

I am educated. I will do all the research at home online and know almost as much as your employees in a short time. I will have a couple questions and then buy something.

I have limited loyalty. I will shop for the best deal and don't really care where it comes from. But if your company makes an unreasonable mistake, I might never shop there again. BUT, I personally really enjoy customer service and good CRM marketing. So if you prove you are a good place to shop. I might be loyal.

I will abuse your system, if you let me. Key Bank has now given me 3 iPod nanos, for free (holding my money for a day before I transferred it to my ING Direct account is really close to free). I have and will cancel my account with them and only open an account when you offer me another iPod nano. This brings up another topic I will discuss some other time.

Figuring out how to sell to me must be difficult. Using disruptive methods along with the traditional is one way. I'll discuss more on disruption in my next post.

just a few of my thoughts