Purpose

The purpose of this thesis is, looking from a consumer’s perspective, to investigate the influences of students website selection

Background

Today’s students are a new generation of consumers. They have been brought up with digi-tal media and have different attitudes towards marketing than their parents. Most market management theories were created before the digital revolution. Students are tomorrow’s high income consumers. It is valuable for companies to understand how these consumers orientate themselves on the internet and how to best reach them.

Method

An exploratory/explanatory deductive study to map what websites students use, how the websites are found and why they are used was conducted. The empirical findings were col-lected through group interviews.

Conclusion

Students have a very habitual behavior on the internet. They use some of the internet’s largest brands. Each website offers a niche and specialized service, presented in a simple and interactive manner. Students choose one website for each specific service. As the in-ternet is large with a lot of information they have a cluster of chore websites visited on a regular basis. From that base, students use friends and search engines to navigate them-selves to the destinations of their choice. Advertisement offer more trust than enticement to actually visit the sites.