There was an interesting piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal from Mark Penn, the author of Microtrends. Penn, through a survey of 300 U.S. Adults back in October 2008, has identified a group of online information-based shoppers that he calls the New Info Shopper.
In the article, Penn describes how this breed of shopper is more inclined to research online before making a purchase. Using the domains he described in the article (Metacritic and Zagat, as well as some the we added such as Tripadvisor and RottenTomatoes) we have been able to quantify this type of Information shopping, as well as flesh-out the members of this group using our demographic and Lifestyle data.

We can see that since this fall, Info Shopping traffic has seen a dramatic increase since May 2008, increasing to over .18% of all Internet traffic U.S., then dropping during the holidays before rebounding at the beginning of this year.
From our demographic data, we can see that there is a strong 55+ component to the info shopper, with that age group accounting for over 34% off all traffic to the category.

Finally, leveraging Mosaic types in Hitwise Lifestyle data, we can identify the type that indexes the highest in visits to this category when compared with the U.S. online population. For the four weeks ending January 3, 2009, that type is B02, also known as the Affluent Urban Professional. With an index of 269, this group is nearly three times as likely to visit the custom category of Info Shoppers than the overall U.S. Internet user.
Our Experian research reveals that there are over 1.99 million members to this group and they are characterized as “wealthy singles and couples living in chic high-rise neighborhoods of big cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago.” As the retail climate continues to challenge marketers in-line with economic troubles, being able to identify and cater to the info-shopper online could prove to be a worthwhile exercise.