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Do mobile phones distract offline shopping?

휴대폰 사용이 쇼핑에 방해가 될까?

Hey, reader. There's a great chance that you’re a phone addict. 

According to a Harris poll, U.S. adults identify their phones as something they can not live without (Kim, 2016) and they rely on phones for numerous activities starting from basic calls and text to storing personal documents or ordering food.

Hence, phone is more than a communication tool to stay in touch with someone. Because of that, marketers are adapting to this new consumer lifestyle by adding more mobile phone experience connected with the brand or service. However, some say mobile phone and how it has simplified shopping is detrimental to retailers and marketers because of the advantages it gives to a customer. 

Today I want to share with you some compelling information from the Journal of Marketing’s article titled “In-store mobile phone use and customer shopping behavior: Evidence from the field” (Grewal et al., 2018), which looks deeply into how people use mobile phone while shopping.

We all know how digital revolution and mass smartphone usage made a brand’s work challenging. People can gain access to information online whenever and wherever. Now they know all the tricks marketers used to use and they smartly don’t respond to it. People are on their phones pretty much all the time! And that’s why you see signs that remind you “No phone while walking” or “No phone while driving.”  

For many reasons, phone is a distraction for us. Especially, phone is #1 enemy for retailers who rely on impulse purchases. Rather that reading promotional messages of sales promotions, or buying candies at the checkout consumers spend their time watching phone now. Following that, retailers often think that phone usage affects sales in a negative way and try to prevent such behavior without having any evidences. 

Authors question that distraction has negative effect on sales and overall consumer experience and conduct a field study combined with field experiment.

To assure that in-store phone distraction increases consumers purchases they use attention capacity theories. Limited attention capacity theories explain how distraction diverts attention from main task and people are unable to process their task. Thus, people’s amount of the information or the number of tasks has limited capacity. In some theories scientists use term “Working memory”, which is a consumer’s ability to store and process information. Working memory can’t be done while multitasking. Strong memory capacity implies that consumer can avoid distraction and achieve its goal.

Based on theories above, authors established 4 main hypotheses for the study:

H1: Mobile phone use in stores increases consumers total time spent in the store and purchases.

H2: Mobile phone use in stores increases shelf attention (and purchases)

H3: Mobile phone use in stores increases customers loop diversion (and purchases)

H4: Total time spent in the store, shelf attention, and customer loop diversion mediate the relationship between mobile phone use and increased purchases.

Study 1 was conducted in 4 grocery stores in Sweden. Eye-tracking glasses were used to record the eye movements

We can see the difference between consumers using and not using mobile phone. As proposed, people who used mobile phone made more purchases, spent longer time in store, paid more attention to shelves and deviated from traditional consumer loop. Study 1 confirmed positive effect for retailers.

Study 2 was conducted in two grocery stores. This time, people were asked to not use mobile phone and a measure of customer’s distraction levels had been added.

Similar to Study 1, positive effects on distraction, number of items, time in store, shelf attention and effects on consumer loop diversion were found. In this study researchers were able that it is not phone, but the distraction from focal task leads to behavioral responses as more purchases or time spent in store.

Without doubts, mobile phone is a distraction for consumers. As they become distracted, they unconsciously spend more time in store, make greater purchases and so on. This may be beneficial to retailers and pricey to consumers. Moreover, mobile phones do not affect customer’s satisfaction with shopping experience in any way, so retailers should not worry about it. Even though by using mobile phone consumer may be less inclined to impulse offers at checkout, they will make greater purchases by spending more time in the store without even knowing it!

Two key takeaways from the results of the research are as follows: 

• In order to save some money, you need to have prepared list of things you need to buy and don’t distract yourself with mobile phone. 

• On the flip side, if you’re a retailer or a marketer, you need to encourage customer usage of phone inside the store.  

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Reference

Grewal, D., Ahlbom, C., Beitelspacher, L., Noble, S. M., & Nordfält, J. (2018). In-store mobile phone use and customer shopping behavior: Evidence from the field. Journal of Marketing, 82(4), 102-126.