Retailers already know consumers use the Web to research electronics before they buy, but are marketers missing opportunities to connect and influence the purchase?

I have been shopping for a new PDA and my first digital camera for weeks. I’ve looked at dozens of each in a variety of brands, makes and models. I’ve compared prices among half-a-dozen different retailers. I’ve learned a lot about the features I already wanted in my new PDA and camera, and I’ve learned a lot about features I didn’t know I wanted.

After all my travels, I’ve concluded that I’m going to get the Treo 600 PDA, which will also double as my mobile phone, and I’m going to wait until Christmas to see about the digital camera (maybe Santa will bring me one?!).

Throughout all of this, I’ve only been to a brick-and-mortar retail outlet once. Why?

Because I’ve been doing all my shopping online. And I’m not alone. Millions of people are shopping in the same fashion for all manner of consumer electronics. They are shopping this way for all manner of products, to be honest.

This year looks to be the biggest year for online shopping of any year previously. This should come as no surprise, given that every year since the dawn of ecommerce has been the biggest year for online holiday shopping.

Jupiter Research forecasts online holiday sales will grow from 2002's $13.8 billion to $16.8 billion this year. Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer—in a presentation he gave at MediaPost's Forecast 2004 held in September— was even more upbeat. He said online product sales will come in at $17.7 billion by the time this holiday shopping season is over. That would be increase of 29.1 percent over the 2002 holidays, which itself was a 27.6 percent increase over 2001. Online holiday sales were just was $5.39 billion in 1999.

And online purchases are still a small part of retail sales—fourth-quarter online sales were 1.6 percent of the total retail sales—but the percentage is growing, and growing by a healthy rate.

So regardless of who is doing the predicting, one thing is clear: beaucoup shopping online this year.

This means advertisers have to be actively out in the market to engage potential consumers and convince them to buy their particular something. This means advertising in places where consumers are found. For consumer electronics, this place is the Web.

In a recent study, Forrester Research found that when consumers buy electronics they go through a 3-stage process, progressing from awareness to consideration to purchase. Earlier this year, Forrester surveyed consumers about their most recent purchase and found that most buying cycles cover weeks and sometimes months: Only 17 percent of buyers made their purchase less than a week after starting to think about buying the device.

In this same study, 17 percent of those surveyed indicated that some aspect of the Internet was involved with driving their product consideration and preference, be it a shopping-comparison Website or online advertising. But what is interesting to note is that of those who said that the Internet, in its various manifestations, influenced their purchase decision, online advertising itself only influenced 6 percent.

Online advertising is not as universally used and promoted among marketers of consumer electronics as it would seem the medium should be. Online advertising is only as important to a marketer of consumer electronics as that marketer chooses to make it. There doesn’t appear to be any hard and fast conventional wisdom to use as a guideline.

Although online advertising for consumer electronics manufacturers is becoming a more important part of the overall media mix, the most significant use of the Internet for these marketers is as a place for people to do research and as a point of ancillary distribution.

As with the buying of most products, the retailer plays a significant role in the process a consumer goes through when making a purchase of electronics. As it turns out, more consumers decide where they're going to buy a device before they decide which brand and model to buy. This means they decide to go to Target or Circuit City or Best Buy before they decide what to get.

It is those products that seem to benefit most from manufacturer-direct sales that have made the most of the Internet as a marketing tool: computers and related devices.

Marketers of computers and peripherals (like PDAs) have made excellent use of the Internet as a marketing tool since the very beginning. Digital Equipment Corporation announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast. This is often credited with being among the very first “virtual” ad messages.

Companies in this sector are no strangers to digital advertising and marketing. Most of their efforts, however, aren’t just about building awareness or giving the consumer the warm and fuzzies. They are about driving sales through this alternative distribution channel.

More and more consumer electronics advertisers, however, are going to need to use the medium as a marketing tool for reasons beyond distribution—72 percent of those who purchase consumer electronics still make their purchases in person. The terrestrial point of distribution is not going any where. Everything else that contributes to a purchase decision, however, is changing.

Among the most important influencers of a consumers’ purchase decision, according to the Forrester survey, is displaying products for comparison. While a potential consumer is still trying to figure out just what he or she is going to buy, in-store comparison influenced more consumers than any other factor. And at purchase, 18 percent of consumers bought because they saw the device in person—going up to 25 percent for those who bought advanced video products like high-end TVs and digital video cameras.

As more and more shopping does move to the Web, this ability to compare products will became paramount to the online shopping experience. But it also is becoming more and more important to the total shopping experience.

Certainly I’m no typical consumer, but my experience of shopping for a product that is more technologically-advanced than any other device I’ve owned before suggests to me that others will be doing more of the same in short order. When it comes to technology, even if the price point isn’t terribly high, the more one knows about what the product is, how it works, and how it compares to other products in its category, the more comfortable one becomes in making the purchase. The reasons for this are sublime and anthropological (now is not the time for a discussion of the possibility that technology is the modern religion, taking the throne left empty since Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God), but the acts and their results are not: more knowledge equals more sales.

Of course, the missing element in all of this is just how do I tell potential consumers what should be on their list of products for consideration?

This, my friends, is where advertising comes in. It is one thing to be there where they expect to find you when they go looking for you. It is quite another to be there when they don’t know exactly what they are looking for, or haven’t started looking for anything, yet, at all.

Consumer electronics marketers need to start taking a closer look at human behavior and how that behavior demonstrates itself on the Web. Users may not all be in buying mode. In fact, research suggests that most of them (nearly three out of four) will be buying their product from a retailer. But for a consumer electronics marketer, it does seem that advertising online would reach an individual in propinquity of a shopping occasion, and this might just end up being the most important thing to consider of all.