somersault

MediaPost’s MarketingDaily reports that the AMP Agency, a Boston-based branding firm, has completed a study of consumers, "Inside the Buy," that suggests that actually very few consumers between the ages of 25 and 49 are moved to purchase by habit, or sentimental considerations for a brand. It stresses that online information and reviews is what consumers rely on to make their decisions.

The study, based on a Fall 2010 poll of 865 Gen X and Y consumers, looks at what happens in the "consideration phase" of the purchase path, where the Web and what AMP found to be a "new/modern path" to purchase hold sway. The quantitative and qualitative study also addressed a changing view of brand loyalty. The firm found that just 3% of consumers say they are loyal to a particular brand and never buy anything else.

The study, which looks at five product categories -- baby products, consumer electronics, food and beverage, health and beauty, and fashion -- finds that the very idea of loyalty has changed for 97% of consumers. "New consumer behavior is redefining what we view as 'contemporary loyalty'," said Allison Marsh, VP, Consumer Insights at AMP Agency. "With more information, consumers have seized control and are more open to the wide choices in the marketplace."

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Here’s insight into buying behavior. According to a new study reported in TIME (@TIME), people whose surnames start with letters late in the alphabet may be the fastest to buy. What could possibly explain this weird phenomenon, which the study authors dubbed "the last-name effect"? The research didn't provide a definitive reason, but the authors offer an intriguing theory.

Since America's obsession with alphabetical order often forces the Zs to the back of the line in childhood, they suffer. They were always the last to get lunch in the cafeteria — sorry, Young, the other kids bought all the chocolate milk again — and had to beg for the teacher's attention from the back of the classroom. So later in life, when the Zs — and even onetime Zs who became As through marriage — see an item they really like for sale or are offered a deal, they jump on it, afraid that supplies won't last. The chocolate milk is finally in front of them. So they grab it.

What implications would this have for your brand?

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On The Nervous Breakdown (@TNBtweets), J.E. Fishman (@JEFISHMAN) dedicates this list of publisher blunders to his friend Seth Godin:

1. Knowing their suppliers (authors) better than their customers (readers).

2. Failing to do market research.

3. Thinking big advances produce “heat.”

4. Assuming readers think like them.

5. Worrying more about stealing than about selling.

6. Trying to cut their way to profitability.

7. Failing to teach business principles to English majors.

8. Publishing too few books.

9. Refusing to collude.

10. Forgetting what business they’re in.

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According to a survey by Empathica as reported by Warc, a majority of North American consumers prefer buying products in-store to doing so online.

Regarding purchase habits, 21% of respondents agree in-store experiences are typically better than the online equivalent, 15% take the opposite stance, and 36% state these channels are evenly matched. Despite this, 69% favor making most acquisitions in bricks-and-mortar outlets, while 22% afford the Web a parallel status.

One digital activity that has proved especially popular is using comparison sites, as 72% of contributors have utilized the Net to conduct research, monitor prices, and complete transactions.

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It appears iPad users are marking content during the day and consuming it later when they can lean back and actually read. According to Read it Later (@readitlater), from a study of 100 million articles saved using its service, people use browsing and bookmarking to time-shift the consumption of content to whatever would be prime time for them (typically 6am breakfast, 9am commute, 5-6pm commute, or 8-10pm couch time, the latter being the most prevalent).

When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption.

Initially, it appears that the devices users prefer for reading are mobile devices, most notably the iPad. It’s the iPad leading the jailbreak from consuming content in our desk chairs.

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Fast Company (@fastcompany) reports that “one out of every five Americans plans to own a tablet by 2014,” according to a Harris poll. Most want to use it to browse the Web, followed by accessing their email, reading, social networking, watching TV or movies, conducting business, and playing games. The “reading” category grabs Somersault’s attention: 53% predict they’re going to add devices like the iPad to their schedule of absorbing everyday content. Another reason for publishers to be serious about digitizing their material in innovative ways. Read the full report.

Fast Company (@fastcompany) says “2010 was the Year of the eBook, the year when devices like the Kindle and Nook stopped being luxuries or oddities and started being the norm. But 2010 was an inflection point--not a starting point, and not an endpoint--in the journey of the electronic books. The dream of reading books electronically dates back decades, and, as this slideshow illustrates, the many forms that electronic reading might take are still gleams in a few visionary designers' eyes.” See the complete slideshow.

The history of the e-book and the laptop are curiously intertwined--and not surprisingly, since the quest for a laptop was ultimately the quest for a book-sized computer. Alan Kay, pictured here, envisioned something called the DynaBook back in the late '60s. It was a dual vision, looking ahead both to an era when books were more like computers, and computers were more like books.

DynaBook-like devices--hefty laptop/e-reader hybrids--endure in the form shown here. One Laptop Per Child declares as its mission to provide children everywhere with "a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."

What was it about the Kindle that transformed the e-reading market? Somehow, readers who had been squeamish about e-readers suddenly climbed aboard. The first generation of the Kindle debuted in 2007 and sold out within hours, remaining out of stock for months. It's now in its third iteration.

Though Sony introduced its Reader a year before Amazon's Kindle, it soon fell behind in the e-reader race. In 2009, it implemented a software, rather than a hardware, innovation, in an effort to close the gap. It abandoned the proprietary trend so common in the industry and announced it would sell all books in the ePub format, which works across devices. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store,” Sony's Steve Haber told the New York Times.

Will "i" come before "e"? Apple's iPad could be a game changer for the e-book. Apple launched a major push for illustrated e-book in its iBookstore this week, debuting 100 illustrated titles, including many for children. The market for picture books is considerable, and few e-readers share the iPad's visual capacity.

E-readers are famous for shrinking libraries--collapsing many books into one object. Also noteworthy, though, is the fact that e-readers are physically shrinking books, in some cases. At 150 grams, the Cybook Opus has bragging rights as the lightest e-reader on the market. It fits in the palm of your hand, and can hold up to 1,000 books.

As the e-reader market has matured, it has also, at times, taken strange steps back. The novelty of e-readers is their ability to download countless titles. The WikiReader limits itself to one title, though admittedly an enormous one: "three million Wikipedia articles in a simple $99 handheld device." But the era of the handheld, offline Franklin device is over, and it's hard to imagine these becoming wildly popular.

You know when a technology has become a cultural icon when design students are chiming in with ideas of their own. This exciting design for a retractable "eRoll," something like an e-reader Torah, comes from Macedonian undergraduate Dragan Trenchevski.

And what does the future hold? There is a compromise inherent in e-reading: we get ease and levity, but we lose some of the tactile and sensory pleasures of books, ink, and paper. A major frontier in e-reading remains to develop e-books that feel like the old books we know and love--and flexible screens, which simulate paper, will be a central part of that. The Skiff reader, pictured here, was promised vaguely within the year in January of 2010; News Corp. purchased Skiff in July, though, and we haven't heard anything since. Plastic Logic's similar Que device was killed in protoype back in August. The road to electronic books may be a circular one, leading back where we began, and the company that takes us there stands to greatly benefit. [Additional research by Andrew Hur]