As more and more retailers operate as bricks-and-clicks firms by offering physical stores and online shopping to their customers, it is important that those retailers assess how well each operation is doing.

Through its research, Harris Interactive has found some interesting information:

“Measuring many online retail brands for the first time in the 2013 Harris Poll EquiTrend® Study shows that where EquiTrend measures the brick-and- mortar and E-retailer, or ‘E-tailer,’ sides of a single brand, the E-tailer side lags. The study, which assesses more than 1,500 brands across over 155 categories, specifically looks at key retail sectors including: E-retailers, hardware and home merchandisers, and mass merchandisers.”

“With the growing competition from Amazon.com across all sectors in which it competes, brands like Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and others are looking to understand how to better compete against this ubiquitous retailer. Results from the 2013 study show that many retailers have a way to go; specifically, for most brands measured, the local store outperforms its online counterpart. Retail brands with the largest gap between brand equity scores for their brick and mortar and their corresponding online brands include Target, Office Depot, Walgreens, and Best Buy. Lisa Mulyk, Vice-President at Harris Interactive says that ‘shoppers tend to want to interact with the physical merchandise prior to purchasing, it and the 2013 EquiTrend data shows us that while consumers are shopping online, their brand experience when doing so tends to be lower than their in-store experience.”

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