By Sergio Abreu, Alexander M. Dahlke and Radim Rimanek
There was a time when computer-related activities were confined to certain areas of life (largely work), concerned only the most tech-savvy, and occupied discreet time slots during the day. Today, everyone has jumped on the digital bandwagon, leading to fundamental shifts in how we communicate, access information, purchase goods and services, and organize our social lives.
With the rise of digital and the rapid changes that it brings to the economy, McKinsey decided to invest in a uniquely deep and comprehensive survey. The research seeks to understand changing consumer behavior across digital experiences, spanning a dozen countries. The first edition of McKinsey’s iConsumer survey was conducted in the US in 2008.
The research has meanwhile evolved and now includes France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, and the UK, along with China and India. Evident in the 2010 edition is the over arching theme of adoption speed and the pervasiveness of digital content and services across all consumer segments.
These behavioral shifts will soon drive value shifts. Thus, telecoms, media, and technology players should likely invest heavily in consumer insights to shape and/or be well prepared for some of the industry changes that will inevitably result from some of these major shifts in consumer behavior. Here are some of the findings.
Communication redefined
Continued, steady, massive growth in social networks or inclusion of voice add-ons in other services are two key trends that are redefining how we communicate.
Take social networks: more than a third of the Internet users who participated in the research described social networks as an important or very important means of communicating with friends. The phenomenon is not only about its mass adoption, it is also about the time spent using it. In the UK for instance, social networking already represents 27 percent of Internet time. Even among the most traditional consumer segments, over 50 percent of users access a social networking site at least once a month—and 10 percent do so on a daily basis.
In the same way social networks are expanding into other categories such as gaming, voice is increasingly an add-on feature to other services. For example, half of the over 25 million active Xbox LIVE subscribers regularly use the embedded voice chat service—47 percent of them use video chat regularly. In 2010, for the first time, less than a third of the time spent communicating was on traditional voice—land line and mobile combined.
Striking as it is, this is likely not an end state. With the expected adoption of social networks and other collaboration tools in the enterprise world, traditional voice will be even further dwarfed by new forms of communication. Of the companies surveyed, 17 percent already have an internal social network; several companies are thinking of suppressing e-mail and replacing it with new collaboration tools considered to be more effective.