Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

“Brand awareness of offline retailers influences traffic and online awareness, but not necessarily loyalty,” Brad Linville explained to me when we discussed the report last week. Linville is a senior vice president at Walker Information and author of the report. According to Linville, Walker Info surveyed 3,000 consumers for this study.

Consumers cited their favorite offline retailers as Best Buy, Target, and Wal-Mart, and said that the websites they’re most familiar with are BestBuy.com, Overstock.com, Target.com, and Walmart.com. However, when asked what sites they recently purchased from, respondents cited Amazon.com, Ebay, and Walmart.com. Further, they said that their favorite websites to purchase from are Amazon.com and Ebay. “Familiarity begins to flip with purchase,” Linville said. “The migration tells us a lot about offline familiarity and online traffic because of brand awareness, but this isn’t translating to purchase or loyalty.”

Walker queried respondents further to reveal such information as their attitudes (are they “attached” to an online retailer) and behavior (what is their purchase intent) toward 60 major online retailers. The results led Walker to cite eight as Loyalty Leaders, which Walker defines as “companies that have earned high percentages of truly loyal customers while compiling relatively low percentages of high-risk customers.” The eight are Amazon.com, Ebay, iTunes, Land’s End, L.L. Bean, QVC, Victoria’s Secret, and Walgreens.