Teens and Fashion online - retail, mobile and social habits

Working with our client River Island over the last few years has meant I have come into contact with many young, fashionable and beautiful people (Could there be a more disliked bunch? And no, according to Mrs Sutherland this apparently doesn't make me any of the above by default!)

Its also interesting to see the staff there as a cross-section of the Generation Y and Millenial demographic that is now becomming the new workforce. They live online, they work online (well, the ones in the thriving eCommerce and Marketing teams that I speak to on a daily basis do) and they socialise online using the obvious social media sites of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The work we have done with them has meant this thirty-something consultant has also seen how high street retailers have now firmly embraced the new breed of mini celebrities and digital-savvy fashionistas that have grown in number and prominence over the last few years.

With virtually every cell phone now having a camera, teens are walking into changing rooms and happily snapping pictures of their fashionable mates. They are then either texting it to their friends or posting the photos to their Facebook profile for instant fashion feedback.

These online friends and the technology to instantly share is playing a huge role in fashion that retailers are only just starting to tune into. In understanding and analysing these habits..... the clever retailer will find new ways to engage with this audience, build a relationship and hopefully drive sales.

Global vs local search habits

There's a difference of opinion out on the Internet as to whether George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “If you want to see how a society thinks, look at what it searches for.”

However, even if he didn't say it, its worth crediting it to him anyway.... particularly in the online world where the zeitgeist, hopes & fears and social drivers of society can be quickly gauged by seeing what their people look for in seach engines.

However, when putting some work together for a potential client, we have been discussing if search habits are different across the Internet and for me the answer has to be "Yes", for example...

• Different countries / regions have different languages. Even translated, these lose a little something along the way http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/
• Trends, thoughts and influences differ from place to place over time and although there may be global memes, these are no-doubt subtley different at a local level.
• Different search engines are used across the world (e.g. Naver.com is popular in Korea and Baidu.com is bigger than Google.cn), these have different indexing algorythms and therefore differing search results.

But accepting that there are these differences, the next question should be "are the ways that people use search engines different from place to place?". By this, I mean:

1. Do users in different counties go to search engines for different reasons at a different points in their consideration/buying cycle?
2. Do search engine visitors from different markets/locale's trust the results in varying ways?
3. Do a different numbers of pages of results get looked at depending on the language of the user?
4. etc.

All food for thought and possibly a much bigger topic than just one blog post.......