How do you use your phone?

The sight of a man walking down the street with his ear glued to his cellphone, or a woman texting while on the bus has become a part of the backdrop of today’s constant communication.  Finding out how people invest time and money through phone usage can yield insights into how instantaneous updates can affect consumer habits and purchases. According to a recent study conducted on FGI Research’s SmartPanel™, 52% of respondents have increased the amount they access the internet through a mobile device in the past twelve months. So how does having internet access on a mobile device impact consumers’ time and spending habits?

Using the internet has become one of the easiest ways to find the services and products consumers want, which is no doubt why 69% of respondents are committed to using the internet on their personal computers just as much in the next twelve months as they do now. Nineteen percent of respondents expect to access the internet via personal computers even more in the coming months.  The continual use of the internet bleeds over into accessing the web on mobile devices.  Over half of respondents ...

How are increasing prices affecting consumers?

Are price increases changing consumer spending habits?  According to a recent study conducted on FGI Research’s SmartPanel™ when it comes to consumer products, many shoppers say yes.  Thirty percent of respondents plan to stay with the same brand when purchasing groceries, 43% for the purchase of clothes, 36% when purchasing cleaning products, 38% for toys and 53% of respondents will not change their spending habits when purchasing electronics. This means that the majority of people are planning to switch to a different brand when shopping for these goods.

Additionally, half of consumers would rather pay more for their current volume of groceries while nearly as many respondents (46%) would rather reduce the volume of household products while still paying the same price for the goods they purchase. Very few respondents (4%) would prefer to reduce quality instead of the two previously mentioned options.

Are online ads worth what companies are paying for them?

Has the Internet Changed How we Listen to Music?

Data suggests people who listen to music on portable devices or through online media own more music and listen longer.

A recent study on the FGI SmartPanel suggests that using online media and portable devices to listen to music correlates with listening to more music overall. With 43% of respondents saying that they use an iPod or similar mp3 player, that’s a lot of listening. Nevertheless, the same survey indicates that older media, like CDs and radio, retain their edge: 81% of respondents listen to music on the radio, and 61% say they listen to music on CDs. Then again, the data seems to show that those who use portable devices or online media to listen to their music buy more music and consume more hours of audio media per week.

Another Way to Watch TV

53% of consumers have watched TV by streaming content online. FGI delves deeper into their behavior and motivations.

In a survey fielded through SmartPanel™, over half of U.S. consumers said that they had gone online to watch television programming, of one type or another, in the last three months. Over a quarter of these online viewers said that they had watched TV using a web-enabled mobile device. These trends correspond to data that FGI collected on Google Trends, which indicates that the search term “watch tv online,” and related variations, has seen a steady increase in frequency since 2005.

As Internet infrastructure grows and technological capabilities advance, web-users have gained access to an increasing volume and variety of media. This diversified diet of content seems to be breeding a new type of media consumer. However, it bears mentioning that one of the most common reasons why consumers said they watched television content online was because they had missed an episode of a show they usually followed on the TV (70% ...