A Study on the Activities of Touch Point and Consumer Information Search in the Multimedia Environment

Abstract

The purpose of this study is, in the situation that consumers use not only online news but social media as information delivery media, based on web data, to examine the effect of touch point activities in two media different according to product types on consumer search activities. To do this, we traced the patterns of information diffusion according to time, by extracting the number of the web postings of the information about the products from on-line news and blogs on a weekly or monthly basis, and identified consumer search activities about the goods by using their search traffics provided on a weekly basis by portal sites As a result of the study, it turned out that touch point activities and consumer search activities are different from each other in two media different according to product types. Specifically speaking, as for utilitarian goods, it appeared that there were correlations between the touch points and consumer search activities of the two different information media. In particular, more similarity in the patterns of information diffusion was found in the news sites than in the blogs. In the case of hedonic goods, the correlations between touch points and consumer search activities showed different results according to the time intervals. A monthly analysis showed that the consumer search activities had correlations not with on-line news, but with blogs. On the contrary, a weekly analysis showed that they had higher correlations with blogs than with on-line news sites though having correlations with both the two.