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Mobile Thanksgiving Day shoppers double in one year

There has been a near dou­bling in the num­ber of cus­tomers plan­ning to use their mobile devices to shop this Thanks­giv­ing com­pared to last year.

This comes from a new sur­vey con­duct­ed by poll­sters Har­ris Inter­ac­tive for Dig­i­tas.  Twen­ty-eight per­cent of adults over the age of 18 plan to shop with their mobile gad­gets on Thanks­giv­ing Day 2012 com­pared to just 15 per­cent in 2011.

Mobile’s not just a chan­nel – it’s a cul­ture shift

Digitas’s mobile lead, Chia Chen, con­sid­ers the year-on-year dou­bling of mobile shop­pers a clear sign that mobile devices are dri­ving a major behav­ioral change – a view guar­an­teed to inter­est all with a stake in mobile phones adver­tis­ing.  In com­ments which will bring cheer to mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies far and wide, Chen insists that mobile isn’t sim­ply a chan­nel, it’s dri­ving a cul­tur­al change.

He urged stores to get ready for a surge of Thanks­giv­ing Day mobile shop­pers, stat­ing, “Make sure that you are absolute­ly ready as a retail­er and a brand to actu­al­ly inter­act and engage with con­sumers via the mobile chan­nel and the mobile devices.”

Why mobile needs new approach­es to mar­ket­ing and commerce

How­ev­er, mobile adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing has got some catch­ing up to do.  Despite find­ings from a recent Pew Research poll which showed that 68 per­cent of adult mobile gad­get own­ers come from house­holds with incomes in excess of $75,000, over three quar­ters (76 per­cent) of the Dig­i­tas respon­dents said that desk­top devices were eas­i­er to shop with.

Chen believes that, as things stand, a phys­i­cal key­board makes data entry tasks a lot sim­pler and real con­cerns remain about cus­tomer secu­ri­ty when using mobile devices, espe­cial­ly when it comes to pay­ment information.

But there are also chal­lenges for mar­keters, accord­ing to Chen.  He said, “Mobile expe­ri­ences aren’t just minia­tur­ized ver­sions of your desk­top experience…or they shouldn’t be.”

Even so, the Great Thanks­giv­ing Mobile Dou­bling Phe­nom­e­na should, Chen believes, pro­vide mar­keters with an unpar­al­leled chance “to inter­act with peo­ple and influ­ence com­merce on the holiday.”

Whether this turns out to be a good thing for retail­ers, how­ev­er, remains in the bal­ance.  As Chen puts it, “It’s not a good thing if you’re a phys­i­cal retail­er and you don’t hap­pen to have a mobile com­merce presence.”

M‑commerce, it appears, is inex­orably on the rise.