Digitizing Consumer Research

Abstract

How will the widespread diffusion of information technology change consumer research? I argue that information technology will profoundly change the way knowledge is generated and disseminated. In generating knowledge, consumer researchers will see the diminishing use of student subjects, an increase in the use of global samples, panels, secondary data, and information acquisition techniques. In disseminating knowledge, I suggest the possibility of self-organizing journals that would use the ratings of selected readers to determine the status of submitted research.T he market for predictions about the impact of information technology on commerce is clearly overcrowded. In this essay I have a different but closely related concern: How will information technology change the way that consumer research generates and disseminates knowledge?In talking about commerce, the starting point for most analyses is the simple observation that technology has changed the costs, both economic and cognitive, of some elements of value creation. It is argued that, while the cost of producing and distributing physical goods has not appreciably changed, there has been a radical shift in the cost of producing and distributing information. To use Negroponte's (1995) oft-cited distinction, the cost of moving atoms has not decreased, but the cost of bits has. The result is a decrease in the cost of many information-based components of value creation. This has led to many predictions that Brown and Duguid (2000) label as endism. Much as advocates of nuclear electricity generation argued that electric power would be too cheap to meter, there have been many predictions that information technology will bring about the paperless office, the end of universities as we know them, and so on. Yet, as Brown and Duguid point out, these institutions are stubborn, and we still find traditional universities to be desirable places where we work in offices that are far from paperless. In this essay, I look at both the processes of generating and disseminating knowledge using this dialectic between radical changes and resisting forces of unchanged or unmet traditional functions. *Eric J. Johnson is the Norman Eig Professor of Business, Marketing Division, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 3022 Broadway, NY, NY 10027 (ejj3@columbia.edu). I would like to thank the editor, Russ Belk, Jim Bettman, Gerard Häubl, Gita Venkataramani Johar, and Elke Weber for their very helpful reading of earlier versions. Eric's research interests employ behavioral decision theory and focus on decision strategies, mental representations of choice alternatives, and the construction of value and methods for studying decision processes. He has coauthored two books: Decision Research: A Field Guide and The Adaptive DecisionMaker. A Web site, http://ecom.gsb.columbia.edu/Digitizing, contains many links described in this essay. CREATING KNOWLEDGEIn the last 20 years it has become inconceivable that a consumer researcher would use a typewriter to write a questionnaire. O...

Primacy and Recency Effects on Clicking Behavior

“…Information on how visitors navigate websites is critical to online success (Bucklin & Sismeiro, 2003;Drèze & Zufryden, 1997;Johnson, Bellman, & Lohse, 2003;Lee, Podlaseck, Schonberg, & Hoch, 2001), and the digital nature of online activities helps study this area (Johnson, 2001). Research on factors related to site navigation suggests that links, colors, images, page design, and site design can influence how visitors navigate a website (Drèze & Zufryden, 1997;Mandel & Johnson, 2002;Murphy, Hofacker, & Bennett, 2001).…”

Using Server Log Files and Online Experiments to Enhance Internet Marketing

“…A growing number of authors have written, in glowing terms, about using data from interactive media (Ansari & Mela, 2003;Burton & Walther, 2001;Cutler, 1990;Drèze & Zufryden, 1997;Garofalakis, Kappos, & Makris, 2002;Hofacker & Murphy, 1998Johnson, 2001;Murphy et al, 2001;Novak & Hoffman, 1997). Using actual visitors to a site optimizes external validity and the high degree of control afforded by a computermediated environment guarantees a high level of internal validity.…”

“…With few exceptions (Johnson, 2001), it has been others such as information technology (IT) researchers, and not marketers, at the forefront of studying Web site or e-mail design. This is problematic.…”

A Qualitative Assessment of Yelp.Com Users’ Motivations to Submit and Read Restaurant Reviews

“…dynamic webpages such as Facebook.com), information production, retrieval, and distribution are faster and cheaper than ever before (Johnson, 2001). This increased information availability has shifted many decision-making situations from being information scarce to being information saturated, thus greatly increasing the problem of consumer information overload (Shun-Yao & Chyan, 2010).…”