This chapter discusses the outcomes of online browsing for consumers, a behavior that is on the rise as social media and online content increased exponentially in the last year. An extensive literature review about browsing and its outcomes to consumer behavior, together with empirical data collected from 10 in-depth interviews with Generation Z consumers from Portugal, showcased that online browsing mainly produces positive outcomes, such as discovering new brands and products, increasing product knowledge and therefore improving consumer confidence in their purchase decision. Gen Z consumers from Portugal behave as expected, except that because they live in a more conservative and traditional context, they still have some barriers to online shopping and experience more traditional retail in their daily lives. However, the positive outcomes for online browsing remain the same, as consumers from this generation are digital natives.
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Consumers do all sorts of things online: they work, read the news, stay connected to their friends and family, and browse through various products and services. The unique characteristics of the online experience have been discussed in the literature, exploring how online customer experience differs from the shopping experience in traditional retail (Trevinal and Stenger, 2014), how online advertising entails different strategies for brands when compared to traditional advertising (Morgan-Thomas and Veloutsou, 2013), and how online communities impact brand's presence in the market (Kozinets et al., 2010; Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Dessart, Veloutsou, and Morgan-Thomas, 2016). and online browsing is different than offline browsing (Rowley, 2001; Moe, 2003; Sandes, Komarova, and Botelho, 2020).
Anecdotal evidence suggests that online browsing is on the rise: the number of time consumers spend connected online has been increasing year over year, reaching an average of 7.5 hours per day in the US (Kemp, 2021). Among the online behavior, we highlight the access of two social media platforms directly related to online browsing: Instagram and Pinterest. Instagram was ranked as the 4th most accessed social media website in 2020 (Kemp, 2021), with about 500 million consumers interacting actively every day on their platform. On average, a consumer spends more than thirty minutes per day scrolling their feed and watching stories. Furthermore, according to a survey Instagram conducted with 4,508 users in 2018, 58% of respondents affirmed they were more interested in a product or brand they came across on Instagram.
Previous literature has shown that browsing is defined as a product search with no purchase intention (Bloch, Sherrell, and Ridgway, 1986; Bloch, Ridgway, and Sherrell, 1989) that consumers engage in for fun, as a recreational activity, or as learning, activity to leverage their knowledge about specific products they have a particular interest in (Bloch and Richins, 1983; Bloch, Sherrell, and Ridgway, 1986). As online browsing does not need previous planning and does not need physical displacement to occur (as it is mandatory in offline browsing), it is expected that online browsing occurs more intensively than offline browsing, possibly leading to different outcomes for consumers. An excellent example of how online browsing may affect consumer behavior is the work of Kozinets, Patterson, and Ashman (2017), where they conducted an elaborated analysis of how the sharing of images in social media platforms, such as Instagram, incentives and contributes to the formation of desire in consumers.
Pinterest is a social media known as the browsing social media because it is a shared online space where consumers store and share images they find while online browsing (Youn and Jin, 2017). With more than 200 million consumers using the platform (Kemp, 2021), Pinterest seems to be engaging consumers to use their tools to keep track of their browsing activities. During the COVID-19, where consumers spend most of their time at home, Pinterest reported an increase of 6.2% in their users' database, and even a more robust growth in European countries such as Greece (49%), Belgium (21%), France (15%), Germany (14%), and Portugal (8%). Pinterest is the third most popular social media platform in Portugal, right after Facebook and Instagram (Kemp, 2021).