Online America

American Demographics, March 1, 2001

The fact that Americans behave online as they do offline has a grandmotherly logic - that is, if your grandmother likes to surf online. (Americans over 55 years old tend to visit travel, auction, and greeting card sites at high rates.)

Still, the parallels between the real and virtual world are not always clear-cut. Claritas' PRIZM clusters reveal a number of nuances showing that Americans don't always follow real-life patterns in the virtual marketplace. For instance, the consumers who patronize Sears stores aren't the same as those who visit sears.com. The highest concentration of offline shoppers hail from middle- and upper-middle-class clusters like Blue-Chip Blues, God's Country, and Second City Elite. The top clusters for the store's Web site include the tony town and country residents of Country Squires and the Urban Gold Coast.

Do wealthy Americans simply feel it's more acceptable to go slumming out of sight at sears.com rather than inside a Sears store? Probably not. "All dot-com profiles are more upscale than offline stores," says Claritas' Berry, "because Web surfers are still more upscale than the general population."

This online/offline gap also separates the fans of other similar activities. The biggest devotees of offline sweepstakes, for instance, live in downscale rural and urban clusters such as Shotguns & Pickups and Southside City - two segments that rarely register at online sweepstakes sites such as iwon.com. By contrast, the professional wrestling fanatics who visit wwf.com include upscale suburbanites from Greenbelt Families and Suburban Sprawl - two clusters that seldom buy tickets to live body-slam extravaganzas. When comparing MTV with mtv.com, the cable version lures twice the number of urban minorities from the Latino America and Hispanic Mix clusters as the Web site.

Despite studies showing the Internet gap shrinking between ethnic groups and the general population, differences remain. Hispanics and African Americans have yet to reach parity with Caucasians online, while Asian Americans have been more prevalent online for years - and are more likely to invest their money, make purchases, and research products over the Internet than the general population. Blacks already top whites in conducting school research, getting sports news, and looking for a job. "African Americans tend to do serious things on the Internet," says Rainie. "Adults see it as an investment for themselves and their children."

Online and offline consumption patterns are different in other ways as well. A full 58 percent of Americans visit retail sites at work, for example, compared with 52 percent who shop from their homes. The AOL/American Demographics study found that 58 percent of online Americans also like to shop in pajamas or nightclothes. Favorite shopping times also change between the real and digital marketplace. When Transactional Data Solutions (TDS), a marketing research company in Purchase, New York, began charting the daily transactions of MasterCard customers, it discovered an unusual pattern in bricks-and-clicks behavior. Offline, Americans tend to shop lightly during the week and then invade stores en masse on weekends. Online, the opposite occurred: shoppers bought throughout the week, peaking on Wednesday, before fading on the weekend. "You just don't see the Saturday spike in shopping online as you do in offline consumers," says Bruce Mac Nair, vice president for business applications development at TDS.