Why we download a lot of apps—but use very few
If you’ve ever gotten download happy and stocked up on free apps for your smartphone but then neglected to use any of them after a cursory look, you’re not alone. Experts say we either really, really like our apps (enough to devote an hour a day to them) or lose interest in them very quickly. Sixty-eight percent of us open five or fewer apps a week, and we eventually delete 80 to 90 percent of them. The top app categories: weather, navigation tools, finance, sports, games, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Millennials are 52 percent more likely than other generations to report making impulse purchases simply to pamper themselves, according to the most recent issue of “The Checkout,” a monthly report from brand-research firm the Integer Group.
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Image credit: Creative Commons/Clare & Dave@flickr.com
See below for the companion deck to Euro RSCG Worldwide’s latest Prosumer Report, “This Digital Life”–based on a survey of 7,213 adults in 19 markets around the world. For best viewing, please use Full Screen mode.
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Socialites, celebrities, magazine editors, and the fashion elite are serving as personal shoppers, curating closets via social shopping sites
Molly Sims reports being in a “Santa Fe state of mind” this spring. The supermodel has curated a collection of discounted, southwestern-inspired clothing and jewelry for social shopping site Open Sky. Padma Lakshmi, Kristin Cavallari, Stacy Keibler, and dozens more tastemakers have also hand-selected items for sale on the site. Known as “social shopping,” the trend is tapping fashion royalty (see Mode Walk, Feyt, and Moda Operandi) and fashion-mag bigwigs (see Motilo and Fino File) to dish out style advice and hawk merchandise on these startups, some of which are fizzling while others fly high.
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The latest Indian census revealed that India has more mobile phones than toilets. Social commentators were quick to point out that we have managed to build a consumerist society at the expense of developing essential services. While there’s no denying the fact that a lot needs to be done to bridge the rich-poor divide in India, it would be foolish of us to reduce the booming mobile phones market to mere consumerist culture. The explosion of the mobile phone user base has changed lives in unimaginable ways in rural India and among the urban poor.
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The “Bring Your Own Device” trend is now approved by more bosses—but not without reservations
It’s Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work day in the United States, but many workers are more concerned about bringing their other babies into the workplace—their smartphones, tablets, laptops, et al. A trend dubbed BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or BYOT (Bring Your Own Tablet or Bring Your Own Technology) is most common in the technology, financial, and insurance sectors, and IT departments say it’s increasing productivity in the workplace even as it poses a security risk. One new study found that 60 percent of North American companies grant employees access to corporate networks with their own devices. It may not be surprising, then,
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Never in the course of human interaction have so many shared so much about themselves with so many others—and with so little apparent concern for their privacy. Was it really just a generation ago that people kept all but their most basic information under virtual lock and key? Today, we happily share our date and place of birth, name of our first pet, mother’s maiden name, favorite movie or book, favorite color, first school teacher—and myriad other snippets of information required by online services as part of their security procedures.
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All this time people have struggled with unhealthy addictions to everything from bourbon and sex to chocolate. Turns out, all you need to do to get them to go cold turkey is threaten to take away their Internet.
Boston Consulting Group asked survey participants across the globe what they’d be willing to trade for Internet access for one year. Here are the U.S. results:
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I am what you would call a lo-fi person. Research in Motion has never been able to entice me into getting myself one of their interruption devices. The incessant “You’ve got mail” popup of Lotus Notes is bad enough; who needs more. One of the daily recurrences of life is jumping into a cab with a couple of senior colleagues to rush to a client meeting. Within minutes there’s an email in the inbox, and my colleagues are completely consumed with answering each one in the next 15 seconds. Often the replies are off-the-cuff and erroneous. Wouldn’t you rather spend the journey focusing on the upcoming meeting and having a rich 30 minutes of conversation? The malaise, however, starts at the top. Increasingly there’s a breed of CEOs who are measuring people by the speed of response rather than the quality of response. But is this the right way?
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This digital life has been the discussion of marketers all over the world for the last few years, with one POV: “There is only one future and it is digital; analog is dead.”
Cautiously questioning the role of digital for brands—and, more so, its importance for mankind—was considered akin to questioning global warming. Too strong a comparison? I don’t think so. It was impossible to have a grown-up conversation, even though many studies—both quantitative and qualitative—clearly show that the current impact of the “digital world” on business success and/or brand building is minor.
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