Laptops
are from Mars, smartphones are from Venus. Or to put it another way, computers
are for school and work tasks, while smartphones are for leisure and
socializing.
At
least that’s the way young people see it. Shopping falls in the smartphone
bucket, by the way.
In
a post for Internet Retailer, writer
Amy Dusto describes how she came to realize that she and her husband, both in
their 20s, were differentiating the use of their electronic devices. This one
for work, that one for fun.
Then
the point was driven home for Dusto by the 17-year-old son of a business
colleague. The boy left his laptop, where he’d been doing homework, to walk
across the room to pick up his cellphone and make a clothing purchase. He was
dismissive when an adult suggested he could have made the transaction right
from the laptop.
Another
Internet Retailer commentator, Bill
Siwicki, points to data from an IDC
survey in March showing that smartphone owners aged 18-44 spend 84% of their
phone usage time doing everything but making calls. NACS OnCampus Research, in
its latest Student Watch survey of college students, discovered similar findings.
A
lot of that phone time is devoted to shopping, whether that involves checking
e-mail or texts for special offers, researching products or sellers online,
scanning QR codes for information, reading or posting personal reviews on
social media, or actually placing orders. Siwicki’s point is that retailers
need to understand this behavior and make sure their e-commerce operations can
handle mobile shopping.
It’s
still unclear whether the younger crowd views tablets as small computers or
large phones. Maybe that’s yet to shake out.
