The Handbook of Mobile Market Research: Tools and Techniques for Market Researchers

18 The Evolving Picture

INTRODUCTION

The world is moving towards a situation where the vast majority of the world's population are likely to own a powerful, internet connected mobile device. Already most people have a mobile phone and in the developed economies a majority have a smartphone. Other mobile devices are growing rapidly, from tablets through to navigation devices to fitness monitors. This is a change in society on a par with the invention of the printing press, and unlike the printing press its impact is on a truly global scale.

The world of mobile market research is changing, firstly to catch up with what has already happened, secondly to embrace current changes, and finally to try to work with what will come next.

This chapter reviews the evolving picture facing mobile market research by examining four perspectives:

• Technology
• Society
• Methodology
• Practical issues in using emergent mobile technologies.

TECHNOLOGY

As mobile technologies, both hardware and software, continue to evolve, phone calls have become a smaller and smaller part of what people do with their mobile phone. Mobile phones have evolved into something like a Swiss Army knife, with manufacturers and third-party providers adding multiple, often unrelated, tools and apps to products. Most of these additions remain unused for most people, but a few become runaway successes.

The scale of the challenge of picking winners was shown by a forecast in 2014 by Gartner that predicted just 1-in-10 000 apps ...