Digital habits and how they change
Good marketers understand that targeting your product or service to customers, based on their likely life stage can help to drive the success of their campaigns.
This thinking is different to the traditional marketing thinking around the Customer Life Cycle, usually something like Reach, Aquire, Develop, Retain and Inspire.
Instead here we look to focus on a customer’s age and the types of things they are most likely experiencing and needing at their particular time of life.
Life stages can be loosely broken down into something like:
· teenagers and students
· single adults
· childless couples
· childless couple — first home
· new family
· established family
· empty nesters
· retired / senior adults
At each stage your mindset and financial ability is different and with it so your habits change.
The Royal Horticultural Society occasionally send me leaflets about products aimed at an older audience. If they knew a bit more about me — such as my age, the types of RHS events I’ve visited and maybe even what I’ve purchased in the gift shop — they would know (or could safely assume) I have children and enjoy visiting outdoor spaces with them. Perhaps then, they could better tailor the information they send — and send more of it in a digital format.
In the digital space
The principle about how understanding a customer’s life stage can be beneficial also applies to us in the world of digital product design and user experience.
Your current life stage might affect the amount of spare time you have. It might determine how potentially digitally savvy you are, the particular apps you might download or what social media sites you visit.
Let’s imagine you’re designing a mobile banking app and your primary audience is 18–24 year olds. Statistics will probably tell us that this group is the biggest users of apps like WhatsApp. Armed with this information we could take the design language of WhatsApp and reflect it in our own app.
But if we also spend time to consider what the life stage needs of this group are, we might also discover that they often borrow small sums of cash from each other (my guess) and need to closely watch their bank balance.
Armed with this deeper understanding, maybe we can help them by providing ways to easily pay their mates small amounts of cash, without the hassle of setting up their bank details? Or, to stop them going overdrawn, provide the ability to set up alerts.
So understanding what is happening at their life stage could influence the experience you provide.
Understanding that this group will eventually move up into the next category of life stage, means that you can preempt the types of services they will need as they grow — hopefully keeping them with you.
My own experience in moving up a life stage
Recently I became a Mother. This has vastly changed how I use digital and in particular how much time I have to do so. Your free time is crucial to the amount of random website surfing you might undertake, when you can go online or what kind of sites you prioritise your time with.
To illustrate how big this change has been for me, I put together a typical day for me showing roughly the time I had for browsing before kids and after kids (when I am at home and not working).
Before Kids….
Morning — Flick through messages on phone. Browse phone on commute
Mid morning — Flick through messages on phone
Lunchtime — If I want I can spend my whole lunchtime browsing…
Mid afternoon — Flick through messages, browse on commute
Dinner time — Flick through messages on phone
Evening — Happily relax browsing the whole evening at whatever I fancied!
After kids… (when not at work)
Morning — No screen time. Just get the kids ready!
Mid morning — Scan phone while hurrying to some place with kids
Lunchtime — Allow 5/10 minutes to catch up on messages. Arrange kid related stuff
Mid afternoon — Scan phone. More likely no time as dealing with tired kids
Dinner time — No screen time. Just feed the kids!
Evening — Eventually once the kids are in bed and chores are complete some time…
Three observations:
1. Time. I estimate that I have lost at least 50% of the time I used to have for digital activities. For me, not commuting reduces my browsing time by an hour each working day. Lack of time means I have far less patience for poor experience (e.g. search functions that don’t return the correct results / shopping carts that lose my details during checkout) so I tend to stick to old favourites. Consider how much easier Amazon make my life with their 1 click ordering process — even if I could perhaps get the same thing elsewhere more cheaply, I’d rather have the convenience.
2. Type of content consumed. Far less clothes (at least fashion) sites are visited, less gossip and news and no more exotic holiday dreaming. Instead I began visiting sites like BabyCentre, NHS Choices (Mum’s spend lots of time trying to figure out what their babies are doing) and searching for family holiday destinations.
3. Mobile. Mobile. Mobile. When you are on the go you just simply don’t get the time to sit and browse like you did before. As a Mum, your phone is a tool — finding soft plays, looking up child illnesses and parenting advice, chatting to your Mum friends on WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.
An unscientific survey among my Mum peers suggests that others are having a similar experience to me.
In 2015 there were 697,852 births in England and Wales. This means that about that many women also became Mothers, potentially reducing or changing their browsing habits and relying more heavily on their mobiles.
So here, if you find yourself designing a digital experience for women at this stage of life, you might want to be aware of her lack of time, patience, what type of sites she might be visiting now — and that she needs a really good mobile experience. You also need to be aware that as her kids grow up so her habits will change again, meaning you need to keep your content and service relevant.
In short, this kind of deeper understanding about customers is important. Having a more holistic view means that you can provide the kind of experience that will grow and change as customers do, making it more likely that they stay with you.
Lydia Livingston
Senior Art Director @ Valtech
Mum of two
