CHICAGO ? A Nielsen executive at the Results 2013: Mobile Marketing Day said that although there is a big opportunity for a mobile services to enhance the shopping experience, no one has figured it out yet.

During the ?Making Sense of the Mobile Platform and Device Landscape? session, the Nielsen executive presented data and findings on how consumers use mobile devices. The session also presented a look at mobile trends based on the data.

?I?m not sure that anyone has figured out how to bring mobile and the seamless pathway-to-purchase and what consumers are doing, and have an offering that fully achieves what the technology can do for consumers,? said Paul Kultgen, vice president of mobile and technology at Nielsen, New York.

?This is an area that is going to have a lot of development and work out there in terms of who finds the right mix of offering here that consumers say, ?This is an enhancement to my shopping experience,?? he said.

"A lot of experimentation, a lot of offerings out there - no one has the universal adopted model."

Results 2013: Mobile Marketing Day was hosted by the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing. The event was co-sponsored by Microsoft, Sumotext and Mobile Marketer.

Connected users
Mobile plays a variety of different uses through the path to purchase and differs by gender.

For example, 42 percent of women browse through products in an app or on a mobile site while only 33 percent of men do the same, according to research Mr. Kultgen presented.

Twenty-four percent of women buy products through mobile apps and sites compared to 22 percent of men.

Only seven percent of mobile users pay for goods or services through their mobile devices at the point-of-sale, and nine percent of men use their handsets to purchase goods at the point-of-sale.

The research points to a big opportunity to link discovery and purchase, which apps such as shopkick are aiming to do. However, there still is not the perfect business model yet, per Mr. Kultgen.

According to research that Mr. Kultgen presented, 50 percent of young adults use their smartphones every day while watching television, showing the big opportunities available to marketers to target consumers on multiple screens.

In fact, 36 percent of young adults use their smartphones several times a day while watching TV.

Research also points to 45 percent of consumers shopping online while they watch TV and 26 percent looking up product information from a commercial.

Fragmented choices
Increasingly, owning a smartphone is a prerequisite to owning a tablet, per Mr. Kultgen.

For example, Nielsen research found that 11 percent of consumers owned a smartphone and tablet during the first-quarter of 2011. By the first-quarter of 2012 that percentage jumped to 15 percent.

Similarly, 11 percent of consumers in the first-quarter of 2011 owned an ereader and smartphone. By the first quarter of 2012, 13 percent of consumers owned a smartphone and ereader.

Consumers have a variety of factors to take into account when picking a mobile device, including price, operating system, service provider and data plan packages, in addition to the features of the device itself.

Mr. Kultgen also spoke about phablets ? devices that are a mixture of a smartphone and tablet.

Many experts believed that phablets would not take off with consumers.

However, Samsung has sold ten million Galaxy Note II devices, showing how marketers need to be prepared for all kinds of devices to enter the marketplace.

?There are disruptive technologies to drive which devices consumers will purchase,? Mr. Kultgen said.

According to research from Nielsen, 51 percent of perceived phablet owners bought their device because they wanted a bigger screen to perform tasks more efficiently.

Twenty-eight percent of the group bought a phablet because it was the best technology at the time.

Other key reasons that consumers purchased phablets include consumers wanting an all-in-one device or a tablet that can place phone calls.

The session also presented a look at how two different demographics use mobile throughout the day, both of which marketers need to understand to target groups of mobile users.

The first profile for the findings is a 32-year old woman who is married, white and has a full-time job that brings in $50,000 - $75,000 per year. The woman is an iPhone user.

Facebook and weather content tend to be most read in the early morning while Twitter is used closer to the middle of the day. Gaming applications such as Words with Friends was played either during breaks in the day or at night.

The second sample profile in the findings is a 26-year old male who is Asian and employed with a job that generates $50,000 - $75,000 a year. This consumer uses an HTC EVO 4G device.

Compared to the woman profile, this male consumer uses more than 25 apps per day, is a big social user and browses extensively with the Dolphin Web browser.
 
Four out of five minutes spent on mobile devices take place in apps versus mobile sites. The top five mobile apps for millennials are Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.

Mobile is social
Twenty-nine percent of mobile app and Web usage is spent on social media, per Nielsen.

When looking at the distribution of social media usage as a whole, 61 percent of access takes place on a desktop, 34 percent takes place in an app and 5 percent takes place on the mobile Web.

In July 2011, there were 44.8 million unique social media app users in the United States. By July 2012, there were 85.8 million social media app users.

On the mobile Web, there were 43 million social media users. In July 2012, there were 81.1 million social media users on the mobile Web.

Eleven of the top 15 apps used by millennials are social, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Up until now, Facebook has had a dominant place in social media. However, the user experience is better on a desktop, per Mr. Kultgen.

However, as the company keeps rolling out new deployments, Mr. Kultgen could see the mobile experience improving since mobile plays a big role in social.
 
?The underlying technology is less about what?s in the phone and more about what it can do for you and services within those phones,? Mr. Kultgen said.

Final Take