Guys used to
be the primary consumers of gadgets. The next craze was PDAs for professionals.
Now kids are the driving force behind technology devices: They use
them more extensively and with greater ease than most adults and are
totally turned on by the coolness factor.
In Canada, the
cell phone is rapidly gaining in popularity, although the market
penetration in Canada is still substantially below that of Europe
and Japan. Youth are the fastest growing segment for mobile devices
and comprise over 27% of the current population. Kids are willing
to pay a good portion of their disposable income to own these items
of status and convenience because they are relatively small and
continue to add a ton of features. That said, they don't have the
disposable income (or liberal expenses) of the boomer and Nexus
crowd for souped up cells. Hence...the popularity closer to home
of pagers.
Pagers are cheap,
small and really easy to use. Kids resourcefully transformed the
pager into a two way messenger great for communicating messages
with each other. In 1998, I caught a student playing with their
pager in class. She proceeded to teach me about 15 codes that I
"just had to know". Bell Mobility ran an ad with 50 of
them three months later. There it is ...kids, setting the trend,
out of necessity.
e-pagers are
the uber-PDA that manages your data and puts you in touch with others.
Data management is cool and kids love instant messaging. Ask any
youth if they have a hotmail or ICQ account to prove the theory.
They want to chat or find out what is going on where they aren't...even
if that is just another street corner somewhere else in town. They
also like games, colour screens, hybrids (PDA/cell phone, PDA/MP3
player, etc.) and of course, it has to look cool.
Ultimately,
kids take these gadgets and give them power through usage. They
develop trends and trends are followed by other kids. That is when
a gadget is no longer a gadget...it's part of the culture.