At Campus, we are all for making new technologies part of your marketing mix. College students are without a doubt early adopters and certainly trend setters when it comes to how social technology is used. But we asked ourselves; what’s hyped up and what’s real? Here’s a select handful of what we have found. We asked college students how likely they were to do the following:
Buy a product from their mobile phone
With every trend-watcher and marketer in the world constantly reminding us how the world is going mobile, it is easy to forget what a small part it still plays in commerce. Don’t get us wrong, if you’re targeting students, mobile should (soon) be part of your marketing mix. But as you can see, the majority of our respondents actually said it is ‘very unlikely’ (41%) or ‘unlikely’ (27%) that they will buy a product from their phone. Only 4.5% of our respondents indicated that it would be ‘very likely’. What does this tell us? Though the vast majority of data shows how mobile is becoming increasingly important it’s still early.
Submit a text to vote during a TV program
College students sure text a lot, but it seems like the whole ‘text to vote’ hype is primarily driven by high school students, or at least the younger-than-college crowd. Still, as much as 28% of college students said they are either ‘somewhat likely’ or ‘very likely’ to vote by text.
Use maps to find a place to shop
Whether it’s on their phones, laptop or at the library computer – college students will look it up before they shop. Major search engines have known this for years and built great map services. Recently location-based services have become popular, such as Foursquare. Such services let you ‘check-in’ at a physical locations, either to earn points or simply show people that you were there. Facebook Places also gives you the option to check in at your favorite places. More than 70% of our respondents said it was ‘somewhat likely’ or ‘very likely’ that they will use maps to find a place to shop.
Check in somewhere
This is where things get interesting, it seems like the audience more-or-less splits in two. On one side, we have the 60% that do not use these kinds of services. On the other side, we have the 35% that do. Are we looking at a bell-curve picture here? Are we simply dealing with a classic case of early vs late adopters? We are certainly not going to speculate in the future of location-based services (at least not in this thread), but regardless of what your take is – they’re growing fast and participating is relatively easy.
