|
Guys
used to be the primary consumers of gadgets. The next craze was
PDAs for professionals. Now kids are the driving force behind technology
devices: They use them more extensively and with greater ease than
most adults and are totally turned on by the coolness factor.
In Canada, the cell phone is rapidly gaining in popularity, although
the market penetration in Canada is still substantially below that
of Europe and Japan. Youth are the fastest growing segment for
mobile devices and comprise over 27% of the current population.
Kids are willing to pay a good portion of their disposable income
to own these items of status and convenience because they are relatively
small and continue to add a ton of features. That said, they don't
have the disposable income (or liberal expenses) of the boomer and
Nexus crowd for souped up cells. Hence...the popularity closer to
home of pagers.
Pagers
are cheap, small and really easy to use. Kids resourcefully transformed
the pager into a two way messenger great for communicating messages
with each other. In 1998, I caught a student playing with their
pager in class. She proceeded to teach me about 15 codes that I
"just had to know". Bell Mobility ran an ad with 50 of
them three months later. There it is ...kids, setting the trend,
out of necessity.
e-pagers
are the uber-PDA that manages your data and puts you in touch with
others. Data management is cool and kids love instant messaging.
Ask any youth if they have a hotmail or ICQ account to prove the
theory. They want to chat or find out what is going on where they
aren't...even if that is just another street corner somewhere else
in town. They also like games, colour screens, hybrids (PDA/cell
phone, PDA/MP3 player, etc.) and of course, it has to look cool.
|
