20 July 2009

Today's Cigarette is a Mobile Phone?

If any of you have had a chance to see the excellent series Mad Money - you see that most folks look very cool holding a cigarette. And a lot of them do it throughout the show. I love this stuff. Back when neckties were really thin, and women wore their hair up in tight buns, long before PC became a watch word... ah those were the days.

I have been considering the issue of frequency of usage of our respective devices. With the diminution of TV viewership and increasing time slicing by recording devices - I asked myself a question - what is the "non-physical sustenance" product that we touch more than any other?

Up till the early 1990s - there was no other product that was touched or consumed more than the Cigarette. My father was in the tobacco business all his life and he was a master marketeer of the product. He lived and breathed his company and his product creation. Today - it remains one of the top world brands. But its use has been superseded by what product?

Why the answer has to be the mobile phone of course. We touch it, we play with it, we use it, countless surveys have shown that if you were to be left with only one thing - it would be your mobile. (OK for Americans Cell Phone).

Here is some great research on how people use their phones and what they would like to use it for. I do suggest that before everyone rushes to create expensive and (in many cases completely useless) mobile applications - consider what people really want and then consider the reality of the medium.

Here is a link to the research: http://www.lightspeedresearch.com/pdf/lsr_pr_meandmymobile.pdf

While the research was primarily from a UK perspective - the study is in fact multi-country.

Worth the read.

Cheers

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