Changing consumer behavior is utterly difficult. It can also be very rewarding. Some of the biggest winners of the last 10 years of web businesses are the ones that get consumers to adopt a new way of doing a single thing and stick with it. Amazon, Google, Opentable, Ebay. Each of these companies have changed exactly one aspect of a consumer's behavior and made it part of their background process.
It's all about easy adoption. The thing that we want to change about a consumer's behavior at GrubHub is that they think of us first. Not the yellowpages. Not their menu drawer. Not their mental list of favorites. Once somebody does that, everything else is an option. Want to order by phone? Ok. Like a restaurant that doesn't pay us? Go ahead, order from them! Like using coupons? We got em.
The opposite of this is a company without focus. One that tries to change everything about the way a consumer interacts with the world. Facebook is a good example. They want to be social network, messaging platform, address book, microblogging platform and company branding engine. They are the exception that proves the rule. I'm not saying it doesn't work, just that its a longshot. Facebook got it right. Friendster, iVillage, myspace, and Yahoo didn't. I'd rather just go to Vegas. Lot less trouble. Same odds.
Re: The facebook example... It could be argued that facebook "got it right" because, exactly as you are saying, they changed a single user behavior in the beginning.
They changed the way college students communicated, and that was all they did for a while, they stopped or altered the choices we had when we wanted to contact a friend, instead of text, phone, or email people started choosing facebook instead.
The resulting strongholds it has gained are most likely a direct result of the stranglehold it gained on the way one demographic communicates even as far back as when it was still "thefacebook.com"
Posted by: Brad Maier | March 17, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Fair enough! I'm already out on a limb using Facebook as an example of a failure.
Posted by: Knowist | March 18, 2009 at 03:16 PM