TOC: Understand your Consumer BEFORE you Define your Strategy

20-30 year olds buy 35% of their books online. baby boomers = 20% and over 60 is less than that

Now is the absolute worst possible time to cut back on research.

PubTrack
-60-75 questions
-book acquisition
-individual activities
-key demographics

consumer metrics
-Book buyer profiles
-purchase metrics
-dollars
-actual selling price
-occasions
-reasons for purchase
-marketing awareness
-competing activites
-share of wallet
-planned / impulse buy

[survey is an old way of looking at this. why ask the consumer what they thought of the purchase when they're more than happy to write consumer data in profiles and twitter about bad experiences? is the person who will fill out the survey afterwards the same person we're trying to learn about? What percentage of people actually fill out surveys and is that the same subset as the new online buyer? I'd guess it's not]

Is the characters age, the book setting right for the buyer?

[they're watching who buys what in witch channels, but isn't the concept of a channel old school thinking or can the metaphor be adopted to the web and we call amazon a channel and ebay a channel?]

[why market towards men or women? that's deciding the data before it gets back to you. why not offer multiple cover images based on the user's profile?]

POS was the step to take publishing into the 20th century. Marketing research is the 21st century.

RH Gender dollars spent on books is Female 53%

More male purchasers are early adopters.

57% of adult books purchased are impulse buys. (2007)

Where is your co-op dollar best spent when impulse buys are done at the airport and B&N purchases are mostly planned.

4.5% of people become aware of books through print, but 13 or so percent from online and 30 some with store display. This breaks out interestingly by channel.

"this is the first time we've had the chance to measure the effectiveness of what we're doing" [!!!]

[we need to have experts on staff who understand research data and statistics]

concluding thoughts
"...are you stuck on sterotypical images?"

sales data is indispensable, but doesn't tell you about the person behind the sale