My plumber, for example, makes more money when he has loyal customers, and he's definitely of Old Economy stock. The same is true online. For some reason Internet researchers seem surprised that all customers are not the same. It requires research studies to point out that people differ. I think it's ridiculous.
Some people care about price and some care about whether it's a name brand product they're buying.
These are simply different segments of people. The market for gas stations has been successfully segmented this way, and so has the market for clothes, toothpaste, cars, coffee and just about every other product. That's why the research report stating there are six different types of people on the Internet is just not that surprising. What's far more interesting, however, is that so many Internet firms are trying to segment the online market by age, income, gender, ZIP codes and other easily observable consumer demographics. I suspect they will find, just like academics have found in the offline world, that segmenting markets based on what customers care about rather than correlates such as age and ZIP codes is far more productive.