Sorry Brands, but Youâre Just Not Important Enough to Younger Mobile Users

If you think about how we use our smartphones, brands seem largely incidental. We use our mobiles to keep in touch with our friends, family or loved ones. We also use them as a lifeline to help us find information or places. And mobile entertains us when we are bored, such as waiting for transport or friends to arrive. There doesn't seem to be much of a role for brands. When it comes to a younger audience that appears to be even more so.

I’ve been recently asking a group of 20-somethings what they thought*. It’s interesting to see how they are using the mobile channels and the challenges that brands face in gaining their attention:

The 20-somethings still use Facebook but, I was told it was, ‘less and less’. This fits a widely reported pattern. They are mainly using Facebook for core activities, such as connecting to someone they know or as a messaging channel.

Generally, Instagram (now with a bigger user base than Twitter) is their most important channel (in line with the broad stats) although they maintain Facebook accounts so that they can see what their friends are up to.

What’sApp is largely their channel for messaging, but they use group functions and share screen grabs of conversations to make it more social. Snapchat appeals to a growing number of people, but it seems to be a bit of a Marmite channel that is equally loved and hated.

Their two big challenges with mobile devices are battery life and storage space. Most of them struggle to keep enough storage space for additional apps. As someone told me ‘I don’t keep any brand apps. I just download them, use them for what I need and delete them’. Besides key apps, they are also keeping space for their increasingly large number of photos and videos.

Email is mainly viewed on phones. However it is not a communication channel. It is a place for brand offers that they check a few times each week. I was told ‘only about one it ten offers are any good, but I’ll check them so I don’t miss out’. Others collect offers, but don’t open the emails. They simply search for relevant brands when they need to buy something. Essentially email has become a repository for vouchering.

There’s an interesting example of how these users are hacking the brand channels. A number of them will add items, such as clothes, to an app’s shopping basket with no intention to purchase at the time. They wait until the brand announces a sale (usually on email) and then check to see if any of their basket items have fallen in price. These are not abandoned baskets, but ones that are just waiting for a discount.

I asked the group some ‘would you rather …?’ questions. They were asked to make a choice on which of one of two apps they would keep. I selected the most popular brand apps, such as ASOS or travel apps like Skyscanner, along side their preferred social media apps. When I asked ‘Would you rather keep Facebook or Instagram’, there was was a 50/50 split. But when each of these was pitted against a brand app, the social apps were always the ones they would keep.

I realise this was not a weighted population sample, however, this kind of observation is a useful way to understand trends identified elsewhere. And it seems though social media has become a basic need for most young people and given their limited resources (battery life and memory) they will always choose social apps ahead of brands.

*I don’t claim this to be a weighted sample - the group represents 120 UK undergraduates mainly ages 20-21, with more women than men .