Modern consumer patterns are decidedly different than they were just a few years ago, and they are constantly changing as businesses and marketers develop new technology and ideas to apply to the consumer experience. Paying attention to trends in consumer behavior is important for small businesses wanting to stay on top of the best marketing options.

The way people approach watching movies and television has evolved considerably with the advent of Netflix’s mail order DVD service, online streaming and on demand services. Very quickly, the idea of leaving home to travel to a video rental store to access the evening’s entertainment became passe, as evidenced by symbolic recent decline of the former entertainment giant Blockbuster.

In a remarkably similar story, many consumers have ceased their trips to physical bookstores to make their book purchases, and to physical electronics retailers to buy their entertainment and tech items.  While these failures can’t be exclusively attributed to the ease of affordable online shopping from vendors like Amazon, you’d have a hard time making a convincing case that it didn’t play a considerable role.

In addition to the convenience of being able to do your shopping from home and have the items brought directly to you, there are some other clear advantages built into the consumer models of Amazon and Netflix.  Both services allow customers to easily see reviews of products before they buy or view them. They both have a built in recommendation system to encourage more consumption, based on the movies and products they’ve previously tracked each customer’s interest in.

My personal favorite of the innovations they’ve brought to consumer behavior is the wish list option Amazon offers and the queue Netflix allows you to keep.  We live in an age of content overload, where an excess of tantalizing products exist for each consumer. It’s especially easy to learn about an item you want, and then promptly forget about it if you don’t have a good system for keeping track of your interests.

It’s in the interest of a business to make it easier for customers to remember what they want, and the Amazon wish list and Netflix movie queues make this a simple process. If you hear an interview with an author describing a book that sounds compelling, but you’d prefer to wait and buy the paperback, Amazon gives you an easy way to add it to a list for later consideration. When a movie preview gets you excited, but you don’t want to pay the cost of a trip to the theatre, Netflix makes sure you can save it to your queue for future viewing. How many of these movies or future purchases would we be likely to forget about without these options? How often did consumers fail to purchase something they may have wanted before these became available?

So what can a small business do to compete? Pay attention to their model and determine if there’s a way to apply it to your own business.

• If you haven’t already, consider setting up an online store. Let customers browse your selection and order items from your website.
• Set up a review section on your website for your inventory. Let the opinions of past customers influence the buying decisions of those currently researching. This has the added benefit of alerting you to items you’re stocking that are of lower quality and replace them with products that are more popular with your customers.
• Think about the best way to incorporate recommendations into the buying process of your customers. As a small business owner, it’s possible that your knowledge of your industry and products could mean more personal recommendations than the automated methods of the larger retailers.
• Develop a system that allows regular customers to track items they might want in the future. You could then use this information to offer the right promotions to the right customers to encourage purchases they already know they want, but just need a little nudge to make.