Did you know ? 7 out of 10 Indian buyers for tech products exactly know which brand and model they intend to buy before entering the store. A recent pan India study conducted by Nielsen on behalf of Google India revealed some of the interesting facts on how Internet influence the shopping behavior of Indians especially on technology product purchases.
Internet has become easy access tool for gathering relevant information about a product. According to the report Internet influences behavior of buyers across all type of cities and town with 40% respondents saying they took help of online information for purchase decisions for technology products. This tend to given rise to research online and shop offline consumer behavior. The impact was highest for tier 1 & tier 2 city consumers with 83% respondents saying that they know exactly the brand that they want to buy before they go to the store which highlights the growing reach of Internet which was perceived to be limited to users in metros.
The study revealed that Internet is now second only to TV to create awareness for tech products among metro & tier 1 audiences. Also the study revealed some interesting facts on use of mobile phones for online research, with 46% respondents saying that they used mobile internet for research and 22% of tier-2 consumers used mobile as the sole device for accessing internet for research. While researching online, buyers engaged in looking up prices of the products, followed by surfing product photographs, reading specifications, watching videos, reading product reviews, locating stores (67%) and visiting product comparison sites.
The study looked into the price range of different products for which buyers undertake online research and also revealed that the research intensity was higher for high value products. Some interesting aspects from the study involve –
- Online research intensity increased in mobile phones category when price exceeded INR 7000, laptops with price exceeding INR 30,000 to INR 40,000 and TVs with price exceeding INR 30,000.
- Average duration for online product research was 2 weeks (14 days).
- 57% respondents change their mind about the brand/model they wanted to purchase when they look for information online.
- Laptops (54%) become the most researched product category followed by mobile phones (39%), digital cameras (38%) and televisions (33%).
- Main reason for purchasing offline – to get the ‘look & feel’ of the product, extra deals or offers available, negotiate for price, get details on guarantee, get more information on the selected model and some installation advice.
- On Google search the overall query volume coming from desktop for tech and consumer electronic products rise over 31% year on year.
- Google search volume from mobiles phones for the tech and consumer electronic category were growing 3 times faster than desktop at 86%.
- Growth rates of search query volumes by products coming from desktop and mobile phones – tablets search growing at 160% yoy, followed by televisions growing at 51% yoy, mobile phones at 41%, laptops at 39% followed by digital cameras at 29% year on year.
Google also looked at the most searched technology brands by-product category on Google search for the period of Jan 2012 to October 2012:
The study was conducted at 200 multi-brand and single-brand stores with a total of 3677 respondents from 12 cities which includes 4 metros (Mumbai, NCR, Chennai, Kolkata), four tier 1 cities (Chandigarh, Pune, Indore, Coimbatore) and four tier 2 cities (Kanpur, Vadodara, Kochi, Bhubaneshwar). These respondents were interviewed coming out from the stores. Out of this 86% of respondents were male, 14% were female and over 92% of respondents were in the age group of 18 to 44. Out of the total 34%, respondents had made their purchase.
Complete report – Google tech shopper report