• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 4, 2011

Who is the mobile shopper and what are they doing? Those are couple of the questions Molly Garris, Manager, Digital Strategy, Arc Worldwide, tried to answer with research last fall. The agency found about half of the 18 to 64-year-old mobile users it surveyed were mobile shoppers. Of these about 40% were light shoppers and 10% were heavy. The latter use apps at least once a week are into trying everything from check-ins to barcodes. They also skew male and toward iPhone users. Light shoppers skew female and toward other devices like Android and BlackBerry.

So among the takeaways, is figuring out how to get light shoppers, which are the majority of mobile shoppers, to connect the dots on physical world shopping and their phones. One of the barriers has been a lack of awareness of m-commerce tools, according to Garris, and being able to find a particular app among the hundreds of thousands of titles. So making it easier to find and access mobile programs and tools is a key.

Retailers and marketers should also design sites and apps to reflect mobile activities heavy and light shoppers do most frequently like check store hours, tweet deals to friends, or share photos of products with friends. The same goes for industry categories--rewards programs work better for CPG companies than for appliances and big-ticket items. So mobile strategies should be built around how consumers interact with a given retail category.