Cellphone or TV on desert island? : Best Buy asks 6,000 in mobile life survey

Best Buy Co. Inc. has recently taken a deeper step into the wireless industry. The retailer sells 90 different handsets from nine different carriers in its stores and recently began opening standalone Best Buy Mobile stores. The company also completed a mobile life survey to find out what was most important for its wireless customers. Scott Moore, VP of marketing for Best Buy Mobile, said its Best Buy Mobile partner U.K.-based CarPhone had been administering this survey for the past five years and this year was the first go at it in the United States. Moore said what stood out most in the results was the generational effects.
“There is a different way that baby boomers view and use technology from Gen Xers and millennials,” Moore said. “For example, if going to a desert island and they could bring one thing, baby boomers’ one thing is television. For millennials, it’s absolutely not about television, it’s about the mobile phone, while Gen Xers were somewhere in the middle.”
In fact, the results found that if millennials (ages 11 through 18) were asked to give up either their television or cellphone they were twice as likely to give up their TV. And while only 7% of the total sample sends over 16 text messages per day; 1 in 5 millennials does the same amount of texting. When asked about what would be an ideal phone, responses were also mixed. Millennials want more functionality and as many high quality features as possible. Boomers want simplicity and phones that do their jobs: talking, texting and maybe photos. Gen Xers again fell in the middle, craving fun features, but not as a vital need in the device.
The survey results were derived from 6,000 customers worldwide. Moore said he expects Best Buy to now continue this survey every year.
“We’re excited from the implications of the survey,” he said. “We’re very much on trend. This is the first year (on Black Friday) where we had people lining up at 4 a.m. to sign up for a postpaid phone.”