The past several months has seen a huge growth in the area of mobile commerce. More and more people are now using their phone for shopping, whether they are at home, in the store, or simply out and about.

As a result, many retail brands have greatly increased their use of the mobile marketing channel. Having a good understanding of who is the mobile retail consumer, their characteristics and buying patterns is becoming ever more important.

Recently Millennial Media and comScore have released some very in-depth information about Mobile Retail for all marketers who are interested in this very important trend.

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Recently I asked a friend who owns a mobile marketing agency what he thought about mobile commerce. His response really brought home to me how important this trend has become:

The mobile retail consumers

According to the data from Millennial, the mobile retail consumer is somewhat younger than the overall mobile population. The peak age range is 24 to 35 which includes 36% of the mobile retail audience while representing only 18% of the mobile population in general.

In addition, mobile retail users tend to be more affluent than the general mobile population. They show a particular strength in “over $75,000 per year” income categories, whereas the non-retail mobile users are much more represented in the ‘less than $50,000 per year” income categories.

What they use their mobile for

It turns out that people use their mobile phones to assist in all stages of the purchasing process. It is still most used in the research and decision stage, with over half the people using mobile to help determine if they need a product.

This very high level of mobile interaction during the purchase evaluation and decision stage should be an incredible opportunity for brands to affect consumer decsions.

What they buy

One of the most interesting statistics is that fully 21% of survey respondents had made a purchase using their mobile phone in the last month, not including app store app purchases.

As shown by this study, mobile is being used to purchase a very wide array of products; this is not simply a niche for a selected set of items. Perhaps not surprisingly, the top product category is Electronics, but the list includes Clothing, Airplane tickets, Flowers, and Car rentals.

There is a lot more information contained in “Mobile Insights for Retail Brands” from Millennial Media and comScore; this was just a sample.

To get the download link for this study, please enter your email address here:



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19.06.2011    Tags: consumer-goods, fashion, food, mobile-commerce