Extended product is not necessarily provided free of charge. In other cases a premium
may be charged. Amazon (www.amazon.com), for instance, charges for its wrapping service.3 Conducting research online
The Internet provides many options for learning about products. It can be used as a rela-
tively low-cost method of collecting marketing research, particularly about customer
perceptions of products and services. Typically these will complement rather than
replace offline research. Options include:
Online focus group. A moderated focus group can be conducted to compare customers’
experience of product use.
Online questionnaire survey. These typically focus on the site visitors’ experience, but
can also include questions relating to products.
Customer feedback or support forums. Comments posted to the site or independent sites
may give information on future product innovation.
Web logs. A wealth of marketing research information is also available from the web
site itself, since every time a user clicks on a link this is recorded in a transaction log
file summarising what information on the site the customer is interested in. Such
information can be used to indirectly assess customers’ product preferences.Approaches for undertaking these types of research are briefly reviewed in Chapter 9.4 Velocity of new product development
Quelch and Klein (1996) note that the Internet can also be used to accelerate new prod-
uct development since different product options can be tested online more rapidly as
part of market research. Companies can use their own panels of consumers to test opin-
ion more rapidly and often at lower costs than for traditional market research. In
Chapter 1, Figure 1.7, we saw how the Dubit Informer is used by brands to research the
opinions of the youth market.
Another aspect of the velocity of new product development is that the network effect
of the Internet enables companies to form partnerships more readily to launch new
products. The subsection on virtual organisations in the section on ‘Place’ below dis-
cusses this in a little more detail.5 Velocity of new product diffusion
Quelch and Klein (1996) also noted that the implication of the Internet and concomi-
tant globalisation is that to remain competitive, organisations will have to roll out new
products more rapidly to international markets. More recently, Malcolm Gladwell in his
book The Tipping Point(2000) has shown how word-of-mouth communication has a
tremendous impact on the rate of adoption of new products and we can suggest this
effect is often enhanced or facilitated through the Internet. In Chapter 8, we will see
how marketers seek to influence this effect through what is known as ‘viral marketing’.
Marsden (2004) provides a good summary of the implications of the tipping pointfor
marketers. He says that ‘using the science of social epidemics, The Tipping Pointexplains
the three simple principles that underpin the rapid spread of ideas, products and behav-
iours through a population’. He advises how marketers should help create a ‘tipping
point’ for a new product or service, the moment when a domino effect is triggered and
an epidemic of demand sweeps through a population like a highly contagious virus.
There are three main laws that are relevant from The Tipping Point:PRODUCTTipping point
Using the science of
social epidemics
explains principles that
underpin the rapid
spread of ideas,
products and
behaviours through a
population.