Online? Offline?
More and more companies have changed or adopted the online marketing model in order to attract more customers, and some of them are also trying to shift their entire business to operate fully online. As a result, the online shopping, services and other types of goods and services are being used every day. This major change in marketing has also created some concerns or problems when customers engage in many kinds of online activities, such as privacy, software pirating and other common issues.
Downloading is the most discussed issue in the past few years, and the concern is still not solved. Since the “peer-to-peer” technology has been used in many downloading software and websites, internet users can easily download many types of files off the internet, such as music, movies and video games without purchasing them. That is, customers only pay for the monthly fee to internet service providers, and then they can start downloading things insanely. On the other hand, music industry suffers the most, because the traditional CDs are no longer popular after MP3 music players have been putted in the market. And, even though customers still buy CDs from local music retailers, the physical CD records themselves are no longer attractive enough to motivate the purchase. That’s why more and more CDs are now including some sort of bonus “add-on”, such as an extra DVD or gift to push sales.
But nothing can prevent the sales drop of CDs. According to REUTERS UK, US sales of digital music albums grew by 60% in first six months in 2007, and the sales of traditional CDs dropped 19.3% that equal to 205.7 million units. I believe that the online music “sharing” caused this, and it would still harm the CD market in the future. EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization that helps to protect Digital Rights. DRM, Digital Rights Management becomes the saver of the traditional music market. DRM technology locks our digital media from being pirated, converted or copied to computers, and this means we can’t make back up of our music CDs or DVDs, but it didn’t work good enough. DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act is backing up DRM in US, so that if people unlock or hack digital media which are being protected by DRM, they would receive a lawsuit. But similar law did not take effect in Canada, because we are paying extras when we purchase blank CDs or DVDs, which “grant” us the rights to “sharing digital files online.
Many people are afraid of shopping online due to the concern of security. In most cases, we have to provide our personal information when shopping online, such as Credit Card number, phone number and address to the website. Although companies that provide security feature to protect customers, many online criminals are still trying to steal our information in some ways. Therefore, companies like VERISIGN and HackResistant provide a seal to requested sites in order to prove to customers that the site they are shopping is safe and their personal information will be kept safely during or after shopping.
New technology and policy will help both marketers and customers to have a safe environment to shop online in the future. We should also be knowledgeable to deal with online crime and try to protect ourselves from privacy theft.
