Laptops are dead, long live mobiles

Rewind a few years to 2007 when we all used desktops and laptops to access the internet. That year Apple launched the iPhone, and a year later HTC introduced the first Android smartphone (The Dream). In 2008 apps were first used and in 2010 the iPad was launched.

Fast forward to the latest figures for device penetration and we see that smartphones are used by 76% of people in the UK, tablets by 50% – both growing – while laptop/desktop penetration is 58% and has been declining since 2014 (sources: emarketer /mintel/statistica). Smartphones have now overtaken laptops as the most important device for connecting to the internet in the UK (Ofcom Communications Market Report 2015 ).

The simple truth is that people probably won’t replace their current laptop, or even bother to buy one in the first place.

Why do people need a laptop anymore?

This came into sharp focus recently when I was giving my son’s friend a lift home from school and he was complaining that he had to buy a laptop for schoolwork. He argued that he didn’t know how to use one and neither did his parents – there was no laptop in the home and they had never needed one. All of the internet driven activity was carried out on smartphone and tablet.

And in recent research we have been speaking to people who do not own a laptop and never intend to buy one. Why should they? The laptop has become a work machine, a machine for the school, university or office. If one doesn’t do any of those things, now that smartphones and tablets allow internet access, why buy one?

That trend is also appearing at the other end of the age spectrum with retirees. They are beginning to embrace tablets and smartphones, while ditching the cumbersome laptop.

You may ask, so what?

A good question. Another good question is ‘It’s simple to optimise desktop webpages to mobile screens, so what else do I need to think about?’ I think there are quite a few issues around marketing strategy that marketers may take for granted, but market researchers should question:

Email. Brands should seriously question using email as a communication channel. It was invented for work and delivers information in a slow, cumbersome way. Email boxes are bulging at the seams while increasingly we use messaging apps and social media to communicate on our smartphones. Emails are associated with spam, junk and work. The only reason younger people put up with it, is because older people still use it.

Display advertising. Display advertising targets consumers brilliantly via mobile, but how is it perceived by users? By its nature, mobile is a personal device with a small screen that we use habitually for short periods of time. This means that banner ads in web pages are interruptions to the browsing. People put up with it and it irritates them.

Mobile video advertising. With the advent of place-shifting, rise of OTT, YouTube and Chromecast, in future people will be consuming video on demand more often on smartphones and will be exposed to more video advertising which has a greater capacity to deliver enjoyable ads. A mobile first strategy should consider that scaling TV ads to suit mobile may be a better spend of budget than banners or MPU.

Voice is increasingly being used to search – ask any parent and they will tell you that kids who use tablets (many too young to read and write) have been using voice for many years and this behaviour has gradually become normalised. A mobile-first strategy should assume that voice input will be a more prominent way to interact with brands via mobile than typed input.

This presents opportunities for brands to use location based approaches in a huge range of scenarios: in retail, grocery, while travelling, at cinemas and so on. With beacon technology being introduced in 2016 in the UK, it’s a great opportunity for a mobile-first strategy.

As laptops are increasingly consigned to business use we will need to redesign websites – no clicking into sub menus, but much more swiping left and right to navigate between pages, and more tapping/pinching to access content.

Steve Mellor is managing director of Clicked