Deloitte has published selected findings from its “Global Mobile Consumer Survey 2017 – Mobile Evolution” for the German market.
For the study around 2000 German consumers were surveyed online in July, while more than 53,000 people participated across the globe.
One thoroughly surprising outcome: Mobile email is still used keenly – on a daily basis by 43 percent of the respondents – meaning that it remains an extremely important channel for communication. It dominates in business and commerce environments – in its concluding “courses of action”, Deloitte explicitly advises continuing to use it “as the primary channel for mobile B2B communication”. Privately, however, users are more often making use of messaging services such as WhatsApp and Social Networks.
Deloitte calls SMS “impossible to save” because “only” 16 percent of the participants still use it every day. That of course does not alter the fact that SMS, as the GSM standard, remains the only way to reach every mobile phone reliably. A very interesting question would be which role SMS would still play if mobile phone carriers in Germany were to offer more data for the consumers’ euros …
Some other outcomes, very briefly: For the time being 5G is still not an interesting topic for consumers and it is hard to foresee how it can be monetized in the future – despite the fact that in the meantime especially younger people are also watching longer films on their smartphones (and increasingly recording videos with them). Virtual Reality is still far from becoming a mass phenomenon – largely due to the range of hardware currently on offer – and according to the study is already in need of new driving impetus.
Speech-based virtual assistants are more intensively discussed than they are actually used – and when they are used, then it’s mostly not backed up by “artificial intelligence”. The advantages of AI still have to be communicated in order to generate understanding for new applications the report goes on to say. Overall, the development dynamic remains high within the mobile communications sector, but does not quite reach the same level achieved in previous years. And even though the hardware sector is becoming ever more dependent on smartphones – for quick replacements, the devices are lacking innovative new features.
