It’s the beginning of 2015 and we can now genuinely state that we live in a globally-oriented, digital, multi-screen environment. Millward Brown released an insightful study only last year, pointing out the fact that the primary screen is today, by all measurements and statistics, our multi-purpose smartphone.
Television and desktop both have been deposed from their indispensable roles in our lives in a short matter of time, and today the stats look completely different from what they looked like only a couple of years ago. Today, 151 minutes of our screen usage time is dedicated to our smartphones, 147 minutes go in television watching, we spend 103 screen usage minutes in front of our laptops and 43 minutes toying with our tablets.
Moreover, today we own more second screens than ever before. 2013 only brought 1 billion smartphones to people’s homes from around the world. Quite logical, but where does that leave the common user with regards to his now-changing consumer behaviour?
Photo Source: www.theguardian.com
It is obvious that using all these screens consecutively would make us waste an entire day, so naturally we are using a part of them at once. By simultaneous use, we are subjected to two different behavioural patterns: stacking and meshing.
A user can be either a stacker, a mesher or both. By stacking, we understand simultaneous multiscreen use for miscellaneous content (which, according to the Millward Brown study, eats 70% of our time), whereas meshing refers to simultaneous multiscreen usage for specific, related content (this takes the rest, meaning 30% of our dedicated time).
The study’s conclusion provides an eye-opening fact about how user behaviour has been affected by the multi-screen environment. Constant partial attention rules over our behaviour as digital consumers and we no longer funnel our searches, instead we “bounce around”. This helps online brands a lot, because online purchases are nowadays impulse-triggered and, thus, shopper behaviour is much more easily manipulable online than in physical stores.
Since the focus is set on mobile, product owners need to adopt a mobile-oriented marketing vision, which includes consistency, shareable content and a well rounded second-screen strategy set up to get in line with the current trends.
