The More Mobile, The Better Say Gen Y
Sun Herald
Sunday May 23, 2004
TEENAGERS are watching soaps and reading love stories over their mobile phones, while baby boomers are sucking on vodka-flavoured ice-creams and making love on high-quality mattresses.
These are just some snapshots of recent consumer trends around the globe, says Trendwatching.com.
Dutch founder and director Reinier Evers and his team of 15 senior staff and 2000 ``springspotters" scan the globe for the hottest consumer fads. Springspotters are ordinary people in 70 countries who voluntarily email ideas to Trendwatching.com (or its sister publication Springwise.com) when they think they've spotted a new trend.
Evers and his team then use this data to analyse emerging patterns in consumer behaviour and sell trend concepts to marketers.
Evers, who is running Trendwatching seminars in Sydney and Melbourne, says tech-savvy Generation Y-ers live and breathe mobile phones.
``Hot with kids, in a nutshell, are sneakers, phones, games and music, preferably downloadable," Evers said.
``They're communicating like there's no tomorrow: chat, SMS, email, cell phones. It prompted The Economist to state that for Generation Y, the phone is the new car."
Trendwatching.com says ``mobile content will pop up in more variations and flavours than doomsayers will ever grasp".
South Korean electronics giant LG recently launched for Muslims the world's first mobile phone with a Qiblah indicator that points towards Mecca.
In the Netherlands, thousands have subscribed to watch their favourite soaps through their mobile phones, and Japanese teens have abandoned paperbacks for mini love novels on their mobiles.
Also popular with Generation Y is a London-based service called Shazam, where if a consumer hears a song they like but don't know its name, they dial a number, point their mobile phone to the music source and Shazam will send back a text message naming the artist and the track.
© 2004 Sun Herald
