Digital Life and Consumers - March 2014

Article | 10 Mar 2014

This monthly bulletin on all things digital listens in to consumption as consumers themselves see and tell it online. News and trends
are covered under the following topics: Internet shopping & sellsumers, citizen advertising and crowdsourcing (brands working
with consumers to promote themselves, co-create and relate), frugalistas & consumer vigilantes, microblogging, tech-savvy
generations Y & Z, social networking and mobile onliners.
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INTERNET SHOPPING AND SELLSUMERS

CITIZEN ADVERTSING AND CROWDSOURCING
FRUGALISTAS, CONSUMER VIGILANTEES & CYBERCRIME
MICRO-BLOGGING
GENERATIONS Y & Z
SOCIAL NETWORKING
MOBILE ONLINERS

Global Internet Users: 2013-2023

Source: Euromonitor International from International Telecommunications Union/OECD/National Statistics

Note: Data from 2014 onwards is forecasted

1. INTERNET SHOPPING AND SELLSUMERS

Internet Retail Sales: 2013-2018

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Source: Euromonitor International from Trade Sources/National Statistics

Note: Data from 2014 onwards is forecasted

Israelis warming to online grocery shopping

Israeli consumers are warming to online grocery shopping, a trend boosted by the efforts of supermarket chains to create more
user-friendly websites and a higher quality picking, packing and delivery service. Sigal, one customer who regularly shops online
with the Mega supermarket chain is a good example of a keen online food shopper: It is not that I think its especially cheap but
thats a price Im willing to accept for the convenience she admits. Of late, local chains have started to offer more discounts,
investing in rewarding loyal customers with coupons and upgrading their websites making them easier to navigate. Surveys show
that the gap in price between goods ordered online and bought in-store is narrowing. Many customers have become more willing
to change their shopping habits to accommodate online shops delivery schedules for example ordering several days in advance
to ensure that they will receive their goods on a desired date.

2. CITIZEN ADVERTSING AND CROWDSOURCING

Brands working with consumers to promote themselves, co-create and relate.
Online Adspend in Top Five Markets: 2008-2013

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Source: Euromonitor International from World Association of Newspapers

Note: Data ranked by 2013

New crowdsourcing app may turn swipes into cash

The New Scientist reported in January that workers who pitch in to complete crowdsourcing projects - can earn a small fee for
undertaking simple tasks such as captioning photos of famous landmarks and without the tedium of traditional computer
approaches. This is thanks to a new app called Twitch, developed by Michael Bernstein and his team at Stanford University in
California, which replaces a phone's unlock screen with an interface for crowdsourcing. Instead of swiping to unlock the phone,
users can complete tasks such as choosing the better of two stock photos or verifying if a "fact" on a website like Wikipedia is
true.
Bernstein's team put Twitch on Google's Play app store and recruited 82 of the people who downloaded it. These users
completed a total of 11,200 tasks in three weeks. The team believes that the idea will catch on because each task is so fast: a
regular swipe-to-unlock move took users 1.4 seconds and the quickest task picking one of six pictures to say what you were
doing at that moment took 1.6 seconds.
This tiny additional mental load gives such apps great potential when it comes to crowdsourcing, says team member Rajan Vaish
of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who will reveal the app at a computer-human interaction conference in Toronto,
Canada, in April. Surveys can now be created by anyone and important things can be learned quickly and from a large amount of
people using mobile phones," he explains.

3. FRUGALISTAS, CONSUMER VIGILANTEES & CYBERCRIME

Vibrant blogging culture champions citizen journalists in Slovakia
Blogging is a very popular hobby in Slovakia, with 27,000 blogs registered on the website of newspaper Sme alone. Sme says
that politics is the most popular topic on these blogs, followed by travel, fiction and poetry. In 2013, almost 28,000 blogs were
published on its website. The Slovak Spectator website notes that Sme was one the first newspapers in Europe to allow ordinary
people to blog on its website, and since the beginning, it has published them on its home page.
Meanwhile, the blogging phenomenon has helped a number of part-time citizen journalists to rise to prominence. If someone
writes a good story, thousands of people may read it, thanks to social networks, commented Tom Ulej, a former Sme staff
writer and one of its earliest bloggers.
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Insuring your online reputation

News website Flandersnews.be reports that a growing number of Belgians are covered by insurance against online attacks on
their reputation. This protection is included in some insurance policies taken out against accidents. The insurer is also responsible
for removing as much defamatory information as possible from the internet.
Korneel Warlop of insurance company Axa said: "Removing such information entirely from the internet is not really possible, but
we do work with companies that guarantee that it automatically ends up at the bottom when searches are carried out. That way
even if it is there, nobody will read it."

4. MICROBLOGGING
Motorists in Rome are being asked to highlight bad parking on Twitter
A new social media initiative hopes to easy the acute parking problem of Italys crowded capital city, Rome. Residents are being
asked to photograph and tweet examples of bad parking to the police departments Twitter account, @PLRomaCapitale, and the
idea seems to be working. In the first month since the scheme was launched, Twitter users reported over 1,000 misdemeanours,
of which around two-thirds were followed up by police officers and traffic wardens. In the future, the authorities are hoping to add
data maps to highlight troublesome areas and enable users to track their complaints."Sharing, such as on social networks, is
needed to fight certain patterns of illegality and rule-breaking, and also of crime, urban police force chief Raffaele Clemente told
Reuters.

5. GENERATIONS Y and Z
Gen Y or Millennials - the kids of baby boomers and born in the mid-1980s-mid 1990s, and Gen Z,
born 1995 and nicknamed digital natives weaned on things digital with their lifelong
experience of communications and media technologies.
Bethany Mota: Teenage fashion phenomenon with a bigger YouTube following than Lady Gaga
Bethany Mota is an eighteen-year-old who earns millions by posting her shopping videos on YouTube, where she has an
estimated five million followers. Two million are said to follow her on Instagram. She even has her own branded fashion line at
teen-centric mall staple Aeropostale, a range under her Motavator label, having already notched up collaborations with hit labels
JC Penney and Forever 21 in the past.
The California teen is turning a hobby she started when she was 14 as a response to school bullying into a huge enterprise. She
has become the queen bee of a craze known as haul videos on YouTube in which girls record a detailed outline of their
shopping mall 'hauls' and then post them for the teenaged world to see on YouTube.

6. SOCIAL NETWORKING
Social media-inspired gathering more than Brazilian mall could handle
When youngsters used Twitter to organise a party at Shopping Metro Itaquera, one of So Paulos main shopping centres, they
proved so successful that 6,000 people turned up to celebrate. The mall was so crowded that its escalators became unusable.
Frightened by the sheer size of the crowd (as well the potential for robbery and vandalism), the buildings management called the
police, who cleared the mall.
Were just here to celebrate, have some fun and do some shopping, said one participant. After the event, partygoers uploaded
photos to social networks, while hundreds gathered outside the mall to resume their collective shopping.

7. MOBILE ONLINERS
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Book-swapping app aims to give Greeks something to read

Panos Kouretas wants his start-up company to bring together ideas that will help Greece to reinvent itself. These include a bookswap app called Bookukoo, which helps users to find other readers with whom they can exchange books.
Speaking to news website Greekreporter.com, Kouretas said that the app Pulls information from the website of the Greek
National Book Centre, Biblionet.gr. Users can upload any book as long as it has an ISBN code, so it can be identified and its
information pulled from Biblionet.gr.
For further information please contact Daphne Kasriel-Alexander, Consumers Editor at Euromonitor International;
daphne.kasriel@euromonitor.com

Euromonitor International 2015

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