When last did you buy something the way your parents used to? We’re talking of course, ‘the traditional way’ of buying goods and services. In case you’ve forgotten, this usually entails having some idea of what goods and services you already want and then conducting an old fashioned cash or credit card transaction within a bricks and mortar retail store. If you didn’t exactly know what goods you wanted, you used the traditional four-walled shopping environment to make that final decision after some time browsing.
Today, many people do still shop this way, but I’d hazard a guess that this type of shopping is mostly done for pleasure and the people involved make an outing out of it. For routine or semi-routine purchases, a third of people now use only their mobile to make a purchasing decision, according to recent research from location based marketing company xAd. The challenge for the mobile marketer, of course, is to enable consumers to easily go that extra step from purchasing decision to actual transactional behaviour using their mobile devices.
So why exactly has mobiles’ role in purchasing decisions becoming more prominent? It’s clear that today’s consumer not only wants choice when it comes to product attributes like colour, size and so on, they want access to additional choices that simply weren’t available to your parents, or even you, just a few years ago. We now want choice to extend to when we make purchasing decisions, and where.
With more choice than ever in terms of price, location and personalisation, consumers are now best placed to buy at a time that suits them, not the marketer. While this may sound like everything is going in the consumer’s favour, all of this is great news for mobile marketers who form strategic relationships with mobile marketing advisors like InTarget.
With smartphones being the most important means of customer research on a product or service for almost 40% of mobile users, and with almost 60% of users buying something within an hour after conducting research on their mobile devices, there are tremendous opportunities for marketers who can provide the best and most relevant brand experience at the all-important optimum time.
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