Mobile's Big Lie: Shopper Cell Use in Stores; It May Not Be As Prevalent As Believed

Late in his illustrious life Winston Churchill is reported to have said, "I'm an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

He was referring to the way in which time and progress teach us that some, perhaps much, of what we think we know turns out to be false. Churchill was never a retailer, but with that quote, he might as well have been.

We have been bombarded with 'data' purporting to tell us that shoppers the world over are taking their mobiles into malls and stores, comparing prices and then buying the same product or something similar for less. Their has been much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about what to do before this phenomenon wipes out shopping as we know it - along with its attendant jobs and tax revenues. Except that it may not be true. Yet.

One of the challenges of trying to figure out the truth during times of great volatility is that any data produced may not have much predictive authority because things are changing too dramatically and too fast. So it may be with mobile as it was during the dotcom and early social media frenzies. What has been learned from earlier tech adoption cycles is that there is a period of experimentation during which people try to determine the optimal uses of their new devices at the same time that they simply marvel at their power. So it may be with mobile, as the following article explains.

What is important to remember that this usage is becoming more specific: use in some cultures (such as Korea) and in some retail categories (none predominate as yet) may be more prevalent than others. It may also be that usage varies according to time of day, urgency of the shopping purpose, whether accompanies by others or alone. The point is that mobile shopping usage is no more monolithic than any other form of human interaction with technology. What is important for retailers, app producers and telecoms is to identify the best options and promote them effectively. Everything else may just be random. JL

Sam Curtis reports in Advertising Age:

People do use mobile devices when shopping, but not most of the time.
If you have anything at all to do with in-store shopper marketing, mobile is likely near the top of your to-do list, and you are surrounded by people evangelizing about its huge impact on shopper behavior.
Indeed, a quick search of publicly available research turns up the following claims: Four out of five consumers use mobile devices for shopping-related purposes; 46% have used mobile only in path-to-purchase; 89% of smartphone owners use their mobile while grocery shopping.
Unfortunately, most of this research is misleading, and often worse, a distortion of reality. Just because a shopper has used a mobile device while shopping at some point, does not mean she or he does it regularly. A deeper dig shows that shoppers use their mobile infrequently. And while mobile holds great potential to help drive purchase, a number of significant hurdles remain.
Our latest Mobile Life study of 38,000 mobile users in 43 markets across the globe, based on interviews between November and February, shows that globally, 34% of mobile users claim to have used their mobile in some capacity for a shopping-related activity while in-store. The figure peaks in South Korea, at 87% of mobile users.
But when we ask respondents whether they have used their mobile for specific category purchases, the numbers drop dramatically. On a category level: 2% recall having used it when buying OTC medicines; 2% when buying pet food; 2% when buying alcohol; 1% when buying tobacco.
On any given trip to the store, mobile is almost non-existent. Our in-store supermarket observations in the United States back this up. Of 1,000 aisle shoppers in a snack category, fewer than five shoppers interacted with their mobile device, and those who did were simply answering a phone call.
Mobile should be providing shoppers with innumerable benefits. When we asked mobile owners what services they wanted from mobile, they mentioned a range of benefits: 16% want to use mobile coupons to save money; 16% want apps to check product availability in store; 15% want services that can help navigate around the store; 13% want an app or website for on-the-go product recommendations and reviews.
But it's not clear that even if mobile offered these, they would be used with any frequency. Often shoppers' priority is the speed of the purchase, as opposed to the best deal. They will ignore better offers and choose the product they normally buy and are familiar with, especially in low-involvement categories, such as household products and dairy. We shop these categories so often and so habitually, that mobile services need to do something extra special to snap us out of habit.
Another challenge facing mobile is that often its services are too much trouble for a user to access. QR codes are a good example: it takes several clicks to get the information you want. Though QR codes have been around for some time, a report last year for eMarketer found that only 9% of consumers in the United States had used them in the preceding year.
We can identify three areas in which mobile needs to excel for its shopping services to be adopted en masse and used frequentlly: mobile must save shoppers time, money and angst.
While many mobile services target a clear need in these areas, the user experience often fails to deliver enough of a benefit. For example, many retailers have apps that deliver discounts to shoppers, but they often send offers that are not relevant to the shopper's needs and are delivered to the phone when the customer is not in the store. These apps need to become more intuitive.
Augmented-reality applications should also come to the fore. These services work directly from a phone's camera and overlay the digital world onto the real, helping you to see more information on products or find them in store. These apps require little effort or time to activate.
We know that shoppers will use their mobile in the store when they see a tangible benefit that matters to them. Shopkick is a great example of an app that delivers offers in a quick and seamless way. You open up the app in store, and it then picks up an in-store signal and delivers offers relevant to that store. Aisle 411 delivers store maps to shoppers to facilitate quicker purchases, while delivering context-relevant offers.
Based on our behavioral research on shopper behavior, the following are critical to ensuring increased use of mobile in store:
Get quicker. Mobile services that can be deployed instantly and save time at shelf will bring benefits to the shopper and can also help fuel category growth. Mobile services that interrupt shoppers will have the opposite effect. A good example is Scandit, which allows mobile self-scanning and self-checkout for the shopper, eliminating the need to scan or pay for products at the end of the trip.
Focus on the shopping experience. Go beyond the deal and use mobile to deliver an improved shopping experience that inspires and saves time and money. A Woolworth's app from Australia, for example, allows you to customize your shopping list based on store layout to enable quicker shopping.
Tailor services to category dynamics. The average shopper in baby care spends nearly two minutes at the shelf, but in milk, the average time is 20 seconds. The relative benefit that any given service needs to deliver will differ by category.
Tailor services to channel. The shopper's mission varies by the type of retailer you are in, and is a critical driver of behaviour in store: are they stocking up, or just quickly buying one item? In hypermarkets, for example, where we see a lot of stock-up missions, shoppers will see value in apps that provide shopping lists or coupons with promotions on regular purchases. For single-item purchases in a convenience store, being able to quickly find the product they want and mobile wallet services will be more relevant.