Brands and consumers at odds over e-commerce in new sales channel surveys

Nobody uses the term “information superhighway” anymore, but new research from Nutrition Business Journal and Natural Marketing Institute suggests it may be time to think about fast lanes and slow lanes when we look at how internet commerce is going to affect the natural products industry.

The survey is included in the new Nutrition Business Journal Sales Channel Report, available now.

Despite the heavy toll online outlets like Amazon have taken on brick-and-mortar quadrants that include electronics and clothing, the doomsday portents for brick and mortar may be overstated for natural products. Simultaneously, manufactures across a number of natural and organic categories may be putting too much emphasis on e-commerce while their consumers see themselves pushing real, not virtual, shopping carts down brick-and-mortar aisles.

Surveyed manufacturers are overwhelmingly calling e-commerce more important while consumers point to brick and mortar, mass market specifically, as the place they expect to be spending more money in coming years.

The disconnect may say as much about the nature of the product as the nature of consumers who buy them and from that balance could be construed a kind of caution to brands and retailers who are predicting the same kind of seismic impact seen in electronics and housewares.

Natural products, it appears, maybe different, not entirely immune to the Amazonifiction of markets, but perhaps “resistant.”

Nobody calls it “the information superhighway” anymore, but changes and challenges are showing up at different speeds in different lanes.

Learn more about the changing patterns in retail in the Nutrition Business Journal Sales Channel Report. Visit the NBJ store or email Cindy Van Schouwen, [email protected].