Posted: July 1st, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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Half a year after opening up it’s online operations, the website of Danish retailer Superbest comes in ten of ten in reach compared to the websites of other Danish retailers, even though Superbest is the only of the competitors to offer full-blown online grocery shopping. This is among the findings in my latest report. I say: lower the prices (convenience alone won’t do it), start building trust through social networking activities and make the services known through advertising.
Largest grocery store retail-websites in Denmark. Adult users (15 years+). Source: FDIM/gemiusAudience, April 2010.
Ten of ten is really not impressing
Superbest.dk reached 90.000 adult danes during april 2010. That’s not a high number. In total 795.500 Danes visited at least one of the top ten Danish grocery store websites. Superbest.dk in this way only had a grab at 11,6 percent of all visitors. A number which is spot on the Superbest market share in the “real” world measured in terms of total sales (11,5 percent in 2009). Only none of the competing websites offered more than at most sales of non-food items from their websites. By that token superbest.dk should have performed better.
Also the visitors to the superbest-website was found only to visit the site some 1,4 times in average during April 2010. A score which once more puts superbest-dk near the bottom of top-ten list. If users really had embraced the online grocery shopping concept, they’d have visited the site several times a week.
Convenience won’t do
The reason why superbest.dk isn’t doing any better is, I think, threefold. First, the declared value proposition of superbest.dk is to make things easier – not cheaper – for the consumer: do the grocery shopping in the night or during the day-time, whenever it suits you best, at work or at home. Manage your own time – and be willing to pay for it: the regular offers from the physical outlets don’t apply online.
Looking at the data, however, there’s nothing to suggest the actual users of superbest.dk feels this way. Those most in need of time – families with two or more kids – are underrepresented at superbest.dk with 13.000 visitors in total in April while those with plenty of time – the singles – are overrepresented, featuring some 25.500 adults living by themselves.
Convenience, it seems, won’t do the trick alone. However much Danes want to save time, they also want to save money! While they might be willing to pay to have the goods delivered to their doorsteps, they don’t like the goods themselves to be overpriced.
(I suspect the fear of cannibalization to be a part of the the reason for adopting the convenience strategy. Fear however has never been a good advisor. And lack of cannibalization not a measure of success in it’s own right.)
Confidence is needed
Several surveys have shown confidence – broadly speaking – to be one of the main obstacles to e-commerce. People want to be sure they get what they’ve ordered, delivered at the right time to the right price with no hidden fees. And online, consumers are always have this nagging fear, that something in the online store, it’s payment or delivery processes may be broken in some way. Or, worse, that someone in the process is deliberately trying to hustle you.
This is particularly true about Superbest, who fights a distrust legacy. In September 2009 – just prior to the launching of the online store – it was revealed how seven Superbest-stores had re-packaged, re-labelled and sold old meat, causing a public scandal and forcing Superbest to fire those responsible for the handling of meat. As a consequence consumer trust in supermarkets dropped, and Superbest suffered a severe loss of credibility.
Online, however, nothing is done to address concerns like these. The online grocery store looks fine and professional – and actually works just as you’d expect. But the dialogue is missing. The ability of the site to let consumers raise concerns and ask questions – and to let Superbest answer those question, sorting out misunderstandings or -perceptions whenever they occur – are non-existing. Customer testimonials are non-existing. Likewise, there is no integration to external consumer-sites, who could endorse – or criticize! – the workings of Superbest.dk. No official Facebook group. No Twitter-profile.
Customers are consequently left without any way to find out whether Superbest.dk is or is not worthy of being entrusted with their shopping list.
Tell us about it!
One final factor contributing to explaining the Superbest.dk-lack of success is – advertising. Superbest simply hasn’t been running any ad-campaigns telling customers to get online. And it goes without saying, that as long Superbest themselves tries to keep their online store a secret, nothing much happens.
As mentioned, Superbest may have had other corporate communication priorities for the past half year than to ensure maximum launch of superbest.dk. Namely trying to minimize the consequences of the “old meat scandal”. This also could explain the lack of social networking: when threatened on it’s life, many corporations seek as much control over the situation as possible. Even though a proper use of social media might actually have helped Superbest regain consumer-trust at large.
When (and if) things settle down, Superbest might have a second shot at the online retailing market. When the meat scandals are forgotten they might find a way to go forth and meet the market and the consumers face to face. Embracing criticism, comments and dialogue, and shouting out loud that Denmark has now a first-class online shoppping store.
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“E-handel og dagligvarer på nettet i Danmark. Superbest.dk-casen” 18 pages, 4 illustrations.
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Posted: April 21st, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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Use of social networking elements on either your own site or on Facebook clearly correlates with customer satisfaction. This is one of the remarkable facts I’ve dug up in my latest report: “E-commerce, trust and social networking – the case of Danish online video game stores” investigating Amazon, Coolshop and Fona among others.
What I’ve done
What I’ve done is first to identify the eight largest online stores selling video games or accessories in Denmark. Then I’ve evaluated their use of social media, either at their own site or at Facebook, and categorized them in groups ranging from “none” to “a lot” integrated social networking. Trust-scores I’ve gathered from Trustpilot.com. And the results are strikingly clear: the more social networking elements employed, the higher the trust-score.
Frequently returning to the store
The findings is even more remarkable since I’m also able to show a clear positive connection between trust-scores and the usage of the online stores: the higher the trust-scores, the more frequently users returns to the store.
Happy customers returns more often online
Thinking about it, It’s hardly surprising that happy customers return more often than unhappy ones. However this probably is more so in an online shopping environment where issues like “what stores are within walking distance?” won’t be able to distract you from following your gut feelings: shop at the stores you like the best.
Spread the good news; dampen the bad
As for the connection between Facebookish behaviour and trust-scores the logic runs as follows: mechanisms whereby customers can express themselves to other customers helps to spread the good news, when customers are actually happy and serves to show the store in question to be responsive, listening to customers complaints, when complaints arises.
The three Facebook-effects
This leads to the following:
- Existing customers are hence reinforced in their positive impressions, to the extend they are positive in the first place. This leads to higher trust-scores.
- If existing customers have negative experiences with the store in question, they might feel relief simply by being allowed to raise their criticism at an officially endorsed site. At best, they’ll eventually forgive mistakes made by the store. This might lead to less negative evaluation and higher trust-scores.
- Users who are not yet customers will be directly influenced by positive endorsements (“this sounds like a good place for me to shop”), while criticism (to the extend, off course, the store’s able to provide adequate explanations for it’s behaviour) creates a feeling of responsiveness and willingness to deal with mistakes when they occur. Both off which will lead to higher trust-scores, when the customers eventually makes his first purchase.
The eight sites dealt with in the report are amazon.com/amazon.co.uk, cdon.dk, coolshop.dk, komplett.dk, elgiganten.dk, fona.dk, gucca.dk and wupti.com.
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“E-commerce, trust and social networking – the case of Danish online video game stores” 15 pages, 6 illustrations, 2 tables.
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Posted: March 3rd, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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In 2009 Danes spend more than 1,5 billion hours on the Internet, up almost 300 million hours from 2008, a growth of 22,9 percent. One individual site in particular stands out: Facebook accounts for half of the entire growth.
These are among the main findings in “State of the Danish Internet 2009″ – my latest report, published today. Find reference below.
Dwelling on Facebook, I find Danes to have spend a total of 233,6 million hours on the social networking site in 2009 – more than 10 minutes a day for each of the 3,75 million adult Danes using the internet on an average 2009-month. (3,75 million Danes translates into a stunning 92,7 percent of the total adult population!)
Given this extreme penetration of the Internet, of course you find all kind of Danes online. The group you’re least likely to find online is the +60 years olds. Of these “only” a little more than half is present on the internet in a given month. And they “only” spend three quarters of an hour browsing the web a day (compared to 1:01 hour for the adult population at large). Genderwise the split is almost equal – while from a geographic point of view you find the inhabitants of the larger Copenhagen area to be the ones most prone to spend time on the internet. The 15-19 years olds, however, are the most web-savvy of all, spending on average nearly one and a half hour a day online.
(The findings are based on analysing putting together data from various sources, most notably the gemiusAudience survey, but also Eurostat, Statistics Denmark and the reseach-department of Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR)).
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“State of the Danish Internet 2009″. 13 pages, 7 illustrations.
To order the report, send an email to jon@jon-lund.com including your contact information with subject: “Buy Jon Lunds State of the Internet”, and you’ll receive both the report as pdf-file and an invoice.
Posted: February 17th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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With the advent of Facebook and social networking focus has been removed from genuine blogging, which only a few years ago was the epitome of Internet development. Although social networking has captured huge shares of the time spend online, blogging is in no way dead, however. I know because I’ve digged the number in my latest report “Blogging in the face of social media. The maturing of a media group”. Find reference below.
The findings have led me to revise my previous analysis. Actually I thought blogging was about to fade away. Not so. The number of active Danish blogs keeps growing and reached some 70,000 by the end of 2009 according to overskrift.dk (blogpost in Danish here). Also the number of Danes actually reading blogs grew. Today one out of four Danes online – around 1 million – reads blogs on a regular basis, according to gemiusAudience.
My figures are all on hosted blogs. I found wordpress.com and – especially – blogspot.com to have taken over from local Danish blog-services, accounting for far the largest number of monthly blog-posts, and having more than doubled their combined audience since January 2008, from 472,000 monthly readers to nearly 900,000 in December 2009. The blogging services of established Danish media however has not been able to keep up the pace.
Contrary to the findings of Pew Internet, blogging in Denmark is – increasingly – powered by young adults, who are especially attracted to the format, with affinity indexes of the 15-19 years old Danes of up to 243 for one of the leading blog-services, decreasing below 100 for the 50-59 years olds. And, as the figure shows, affinity of the 15-19 years old has increased significantly over the past two years.
What seems to be at stake here is nothing less than the results of the social media revolution. From being a hyped, avantgarde thing, blogging has now got a hold of a much wider segments of the Danish population, who blogs – and reads blogs – as a natural part of their self-expression and seeking of information. Blogging is not so much a question of cathing 15 minutes of fame, but a means to create yourself through stating your own views, experiences and beliefs.
Paradoxically Facebook might have helped giving birth to this new state of media-understanding and -usage. On the one hand the status-updates universe of Facebook has caused an extremely wide audience to be acquainted with publicly sharing personal details – while on the other hand the limits of status-updates has become evermore clear, leading those with more to say to create their own blogs. That’s at least my (new) hypothesis.
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“Blogging in the face of social media. The maturing of a media group”. 16 pages, 5 illustrations.
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Posted: February 11th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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Socialistan is the largest country in the new world accounting for 31 % of total time-spend. Here by far the most Danes are actively engaged in updating their facebook-status, twitting and blogging. The women of Socialistan leads on, while men are more passive.
You won’t find a Dane who hasn’t spend time in Googledom within the past month. For 24 % of their online-time they’re googling around, looking up numbers and facts and using the tools of the Internet.
Especially men are fond of Newscorpey. They like to stay informed (though top issues evolves around sex, gossip and crime stories). The country is ruled by the “old media” who find a hard time in the fact they’re not the key media providers anymore, accounting only for 15 % of the time Danes spend on the Internet.
In Disturbia you’re engaged in buying and selling. Danes loves this – however there’s nowhere enough online outlets to satisfy their needs: one third of all Disturbia-activity is spend second-hand shopping, consumer to consumer.
The mobile moon is orbiting around our new globe – especially powered by the iphon-ish way the internet are spreading to the pockets of Danes.
(Time spend for the four countries all are Gemius-figures for +15 years olds surfing (top 300 sites) in August 2009, which I’ve digged for you (I also analyzed them and drew up the above map). Socialistan activity is documented in Facebook rules Danish social networking, in Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site and in arto.com vs facebook. If you want to know more about the gender issues, check out War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information. For documentation of Newscopey-characteristics, see Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet. Disturbia-facts and -explanations are found in Eroding powers of digitalization revealed: Secondhand-shopping, telecommunications and e-banking rules e-commerce in Denmark and Oldschool/Newschool: Top 25 Danish e-commerce sites evaluated – Consumer-trust and exploitation of business opportunities. For more on the Mobile moon check “Christmas sales at Apple App-store. Assessing the Danish market for iPhone applications”, Smart-phones leading the way: The case of iPhone and dedicated mobil-sites in Denmark and The seven faces of iPad. Assessing the potentials of Apples new tablet-device. Several other findings are available from my hand; check out the reports-section of this site)
Posted: January 21st, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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When travelling abroad I’ve often met the notion of the three big ones: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Or least I used to it. From a Danish perspective, I’ve allways been puzzled by the Yahoo-part of the equation, though. Case is, that Yahoo has never really been big (or present at all) in the Danish web-sphere. I’ve also had a some troubles understanding Microsoft, being divided out on a portal-site (msn), a search engine (bing), an email-service (hotmail) and instant messaging (messenger).
I therefore decided to map out the top of the Danish Internet in this weeks report “The three kings of Danish Internet: Google, Facebook and Microsoft” (link below). And I did find both Google and Microsoft on top. And Facebook. Yahoo, however, was no where visible in the upper layers.
Interesting Google, Microsoft and Facebook each come out number one, depending on what metric you look at. Google tops the chart of sites visited by most Danes. They have a second-to-none reach. Microsoft is the most frequently used site. Whereas Facebook takes the lions share of hours spend.
However it’s not really surprising. Google is tool. Highly effective – without wasting your time – it’s guiding you on, when you’re not really sure where to go. Microsoft has charms. Checking out your hotmail (as any other mail) is like a magnet, constantly drawing users back to the site. As are messaging and news. Facebook is the social beast, dragging you into the interpersonal (or -group) dynamics of pictures, status-updates and what have you, eating your time.
Together they form the backbone of the 2010 Danish Internet. And anyone who wants to play the Internet game should be aware of this. Putting it a bit on the edge, you need to ensure that you can found on Google, related to on Facebook and connected to through Microsoft. Because that’s what your users do.
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“The three kings of Danish Internet: Google, Facebook and Microsoft” is in 15 pages and includes 4 graphs and 3 illustrations.
To order the report, send an email to jon@jon-lund.com including your contact information with subject: “Buy Jon Lunds The three kings of Danish Internet report”, and you’ll receice both report as pdf-file and an invoice.
Posted: December 16th, 2009 | Author: Jon Lund
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Social networking in Denmark comes down to Facebook vs. the rest. Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Danish Arto are hugely surpassed by the gigantic volume of Facebook. From January 2009 onwards, Facebbok has captured some 2,4 million adults out of less than four million total internetusers. Number two, Myspace, reached 315.000 adults in October, Linkedin 270.000, Twitter almost 170.000 and Arto less than 90.000. This is one of the main conclusions from a new analysis I’ve just published, “Danish social networking in numbers: facebook vs the rest”.
Facebook, Mr and Mrs Smith, the young ones and the Eastenders
Facebook is a smashing hit. All the way through 2009 they’ve managed to keep on to an astronomic number of users – and apparently people keep spending more and more time on the site – in October Facebook took out 16 minutes of the average user a day. Not even the youngest seems to be loosing interest (as opposed to the may-be US-situation reported by Adweek).
However the different sites has a take on different types of users. Everybody is on facebook, giving it a rather “mr and mrs Smith”-like profile. LinkedIn users are well-educated professionals. Myspace and – particularly – Arto have a good grib of the young ones, while users from Eastern Denmark are overrepresented on Twitter.
Women’s winning game
I also find a significant difference when it comes to social networking and women. Even though the number of female users only is only slightly larger than the number of male users, women spend up to dobule the number of minutes on their social networking activities on Facebook – on Twitter it’s four times as much! If the ability to navigate in social networking is only slightly as important as the hype goes, this makes social networking a winning game for women. (More on this in this previous post: War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information)
Twitter reached saturation
While Facebook is extremly stable, twitter.com seems to have reached saturation in terms of the number of users. Twitter first breaks through the lower threshold of the publicly available audience measurement in April 2009 with 120.000 users. It kept growing up until peaking in June 2009 thereafter stabilizing, reaching 168.000 adults Danes in October. Compared to Facebook, keep in mind Twitter is different, more like a spreading-the-word type of service as opposed to the closer and cosier “Baking with the kids” kind of Facebook-updates. (More on this in this post: Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site)
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“Danish social networking in numbers: facebook vs the rest” is in 15 pages and includes 6 illustrations.
To order the report, send an email to info@mediawatch.dk including your contact information with subject: “Buy Facebook”, and you’ll receice both report as pdf-file and the invoice.
Posted: September 4th, 2009 | Author: Jon Lund
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What’s the secret behind the success of the mp3-format, the unmanned MQ-1Predator military aircraft and the top-selling Flip Ultra camcorder? The answer is: they’re all lousy: The sound of MP3 is flat, the Predator is really slow, and Flip Ultra operates with crappy resolution. So argues Robert Capps in an intriguing and yet troublesome article in Wired magazine this month.
The cases Capps rolls out are fascinating. He draws a detailed and facts-founded picture of how the disruptive force of technologies can reshape entire areas of business. But the conclusions are somehow oddly off the mark. While it is obviously true that both mp3, Predator and Flip all fall short of the otherwise dominating quality-standards within their industries, this lack-of-quality no way is what caused their success. On the contrary: the poor quality were drawbacks to all of them – but drawbacks which were set off by another, and more important feature. Namely the fact that the three simply played, flew and kicked ass. Respectively. They all hit it.
Put in differently: when new great stuff gets it right, it’s because they tap into a new dimension, spots possibilities otherwise unnoticed by traditional industries, and execute it to the max. Not because off what they miss out on. On the contrary, they only miss out on things and feautures relying only on tradition, and which – at the exact time the new stuff is being conceived – are leftovers of the past. Bringing faulty evolutionary steps to a stop, while pursuing other and more prospereous ends.
And, perhaps even more important: When new stuff gets it right, it’s because of flawless execution. Because they do perform that inch closer to perfect that makes the whole difference. If mp3, Predator and Flip doesn’t give you the picture: Think Facebook as opposed to Linkedin or Myspace. Think iPod as opposed to Creative or Zune.
“Good enough” is not a guiding principle for either innovation or succes. “Good thinking and doing” on the contrary might.
Posted: August 25th, 2009 | Author: Jon Lund
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Just published my new “Digital view: Life on the Danish internet august 17-23 2009″, and this is fascinating I think: Half of the Danish population are using Facebook. More specific: 2,47 mio Danes visited facebook at least once during the month of June (June, 2009 – research carried out by Gemius).
What’s more: Facebook apparently catches all age-groups – even the youngest, who have left their hitherto preferred native and front-running Danish social networking site, arto.com. Even the eldest: Almost half of Danes over the age of 60 who are online uses facebook! (numbers are all there in the report)
This has lots of implications. The perhaps most important is that Danes in this way are building a shared knowledge about the (increasingly digital) world in which we live. Paving way for a more homogeneous Danish society, I’d say! Not being fragmented into diverse sub-cultures, but knitting the diverse subcultures together in an online meta-community.
Don’t get me wrong: off course we’re not all sitting there, talking and updating and networking each other. But: While you may not be online-friends with your teenage-boys, and while you may not know the exact substance of their social activities (what photos they upload, what they write in their status-mentions), you do know what it’s all about, you’ve been there, tagged that, commented this and this gives you a chance to adopt real-world conversations on how they’re doing. It enables you to reach out, it offers you to build bridges between yours and their worlds.
And what’s more: chances are one of their connections is also a connection of yours. Or a connection of a connection of yours. And that you in this way would be informed should they ever show signs of distress, of a character deemed socially important for you. (This has been a worry of a lot of parents: what if my kids are being harassed by their peers – or even worse: are being approached by seemingly innocent characters who turns out to be pedophiles or the like).
These are all perspectives from an individual point of view. In the world of business, perspectives are almost stumbling over each other. Read a few of them in the analysis.
Posted: May 4th, 2009 | Author: Jon Lund
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Tonight my worst suspicions were confirmed: Facebook really killed the blog. Look for yourself what Google has to say on the subject when asking politely (top 5 search results):
“all my friends that used to blog no longer are. They’re all posting one line statements of what they’re doing on FB. So, there you have it. Video killed the radio star, and Facebook killed the blog. RIP.”
Jonathan Hays, 14. april 2009 at his blog http://offlineinaustin.blogspot.com/2009/04/facebook-has-killed-blog.html
“I entirely blame facebook for my lack of blogging. I used to have random thoughts that would quickly evolve into short narratives, and since the advent of the facebook status update approximately 90% of these thoughts have manifested as 160-character updates instead of a full-blown story. I am going to try to do a better job of letting these ideas mature into well-thought-out blogs instead of little blurbs for my facebook friends.”
Sara B, Portland , Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at http://www.saraknowsbest.com/2009/01/facebook-killed-blog-star.html
“I don’t see Facebook replacing blogs. The purpose for each is disparate. What I do see though is my blog readership dropping.”
Anonymous blogger, 21. januar 2009 at http://blog.jamesfries.com/archive/2009/01/21/3727.aspx
“I’m sure you’re aware of the new kid on the block – Facebook. Oh sure, its newer and its somewhat more interactive, and all my friends are there… it’s all true. I’ve been having a great ol’ time… But make no mistake, You – my blog – are my first love.”
Kerry, Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at http://whatshappenindaddyo.blogspot.com/2007/05/facebook-killed-blog-star.html
“Facebook Killed the Blog … but I’m sure I’m not the first one to say it. Obviously, I haven’t blogged in awhile. A while. Quite a while…”
Lacey Crawford, 8. februar 2009 at http://www.laceycrawford.com/log.html
Also:
Technorati seems to have stopped producing graphs on the growth of the blogosphere, which they so proudly presented in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and up until 2007. No mention of “growth” in their 2008 report. No figures. No graphs.
And:
Is it, as Jason Calacanis said when he officially retired from blogging almost a year ago: ”I love blogs and always will. However, I’ve done my part and I’m looking to strip it down. I’m looking for something more acoustic, something more authentic and something more private. Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it”
Or is it, that blogging is a far more lonely experience than the one offered by the social networks. That the social element of blogs (the blog-roll and the ability to post comments) is simply over-matched by Facebooks friends-list.
Or is it, that blogging is to fragmented, you have to sign up to a thousand different rss-feeds to be kept up to date with your networks activities, whereas Facebook offers you one-stop-updating?
