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Living the mobile life

The mobile phone is more important than television to young adults, and half of all workers hardly ever turn their phones off, according to the Mobile Life Report, published by The Carphone Warehouse.

August 29, 2006

The report, based on a survey of more than 16,500 people, is the largest social study of mobile phone usage in the UK. It was initiated to examine how mobile phones have changed the way people live, and to help The Carphone Warehouse, a European retailer of mobile phones and services, better understand its customers and cater for their needs.

Things have definitely changed. Not only has the mobile phone overtaken TV as a symbol of technology, but sending an SMS has become more common than making a regular voice phone call. People today send on average 3.6 mobile text messages a day, compared with 2.8 voice calls. The texting revolution has had its greatest impact among 18-24 year olds where 51 percent send or receive at least six text messages a day, while only 15 percent have six or more mobile phone conversations a day.

Lara van Rooyen, marketing manager at Ericsson, says the results show people are communicating in new ways using the mobile phone. "We also see growing trends in picture messaging and mobile chatting," she says. "Today's person-to-person communication is evolving from simply making announcements to sharing everyday experiences."

The Mobile Life Report also showed that 50 percent of respondents said they would use the still or video camera on their mobile phone to record evidence of a crime and 47 percent would record a crime in progress. In addition, more than a third said they would use their mobiles to snap a celebrity or newsworthy event.

"The end user is playing a more important role as a content provider," van Rooyen says. "Mobile video clips and pictures of newsworthy events from mobile users are definitely increasing in the media, as are personalized mobile postcards and moving pictures between people. User-generated content is going to play a more important role in mobile services in the future."

The Mobile Life Report looks at six mobile phone user groups as defined by The Carphone Warehouse. They are identified in the report as Generation Mobile, Phonatics, Practical Parents, Fingers & Thumbs, Smart Connecteds and Silver Cynics. Henrik Pålsson, head of Ericsson's Consumer & Enterprise Lab, a department that analyzes consumer behavior and attitudes to telecom products and services, says identifying user groups is an important part in understanding consumer behavior.

"Ericsson's global segmentation model, called TakeFive, classifies consumers into five groups: Pioneers, Materialists, Sociables, Achievers and Traditionalists," he says. "Similar to The Carphone Warehouse, we have used life situations such as age, sex, income and occupation - which are quite stable variables - to define our segments. When developing TakeFive, we also looked at personality, because people with similar life situations may have different personalities which in turn affect their consumer behavior."

Pålsson says that by developing stable and trustworthy segmentation models and carrying out studies, Ericsson can help operators understand the market and identify new opportunities. "As a telecoms provider, we can show that not only is this technically possible, but also that there is a market for it," he says.