January 2010

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 | By Justin Pearse

The year ahead for online retailers will be dominated by customer retention and increasing customer value. How to increase loyalty, cross-sell and up-sell? The exponential growth of the last few years can no longer be relied on to bolster revenues, as our third online shopping report discovered. It found the number of people planning to shop more online than on the high street had dropped from 36% in December 2008 to 35% in November 2009. Of course, the sector continues to grow in value but as the number of new shoppers levels off, CRM will become even more critical.

For brands not actually selling product online, the medium’s use as a branding channel is becoming more important. An interesting trend is for the likes of Coca-Cola to abandon campaign sites in favour of hosting campaigns on social networks. Brands believe the loss of control such moves may risk is balanced by integrating themselves into the web’s most popular environment, where consumers are arguably the most engaged.

Our exclusive survey of the digital media habits of 6-14 year olds found this very young demographic is demanding control over their media to a frightening level. Over a third are downloading TV shows like Lost before they appear on linear TV, and the same amount said they’d like to influence the storyline of a TV show via the internet or their mobile.

Changing consumer habits such as this mean companies online can’t afford to be hobbled by restrictive, slow-moving regulation as they attempt to keep up. So the message to the digital media industry from the person who could soon be the most important person to it in government, Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, was heartening. Laying out the Conservative’s promises to the industry, he said a Conservative government would ensure a light-touch regulatory environment and support a new structure of online copyright and IP.

Hunt said he was surprised the online IPTV service Kangaroo was rejected by the Competition Commission. The end of this month saw the rejuvenation of Kangaroo, the assets of which were bought by Arquiva and relaunched under the SeeSaw brand. Content partners include BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and Five. A full launch is due on 1 March, with an accompanying £5m marketing campaign. This will hopefully kick off a year when online TV becomes fully mainstream.