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Who is the workday consumer: a study from Microsoft
Market development and rapidly changing trends affect consumer preferences and behavior. This is especially felt in those areas of life that are directly related to modern technology.
Analysts at Microsoft conducted a study on how the portrait of the ideal customer is changing. According to their report, a new type of customer has emerged – the workday consumer. This conclusion was made on the basis of collected statistics and a survey of marketers.
According to the results of the study, analysts give the following figures:
- 60% of employees combine personal issues with work issues;
- for 59% of respondents personal issues and work tasks are of equal importance during the working day;
- 63% spend more time at the work computer than they did during the pandemic;
- 56% use work technology to conduct personal communications;
- 39% of respondents spend about 1 hour dealing with personal issues during the workday.
In addition, 62% of those surveyed admitted that they regularly look for or purchase items from online stores during their working hours. And they make fairly large purchases, such as booking tickets and hotels for vacations and buying household appliances. According to some experts, this may be due to the fact that during the working day people are more serious and make decisions faster.
During the study, analysts traced the entire history of the workday consumer. Before the pandemic, the traditional behavioral model was “work-home,” when people worked on weekdays and switched to their personal lives in the evening and on weekends. Weekends were most often devoted to shopping and household chores. Accordingly, marketers relied on this behavior in their promotional strategies.
However, the pandemic changed all the processes, and remote work almost completely replaced the office mode. Now it became extremely difficult to control employees’ working hours and had to rely on self-organization. At the same time, consumer behavior has also changed, with consumers preferring to shop online and in between professional tasks.
Now the boundary between work and personal time is almost erased, which affects the construction of communications with such a consumer. For example, it is extremely difficult for marketers to choose a convenient period to communicate with the client. In addition, many professionals have begun to place greater emphasis on promotion through digital channels.
As for sales trends, according to data from Microsoft, for 2 years there was an active dynamics of PC sales, which is 24% higher than the previous figures. This is also due to the fact that now work is increasingly integrated with personal life, which means marketers need to look for new approaches to satisfy their consumers.