The Next Generation: Uncovering Smartphone Brand Loyalty Among Kids

The Challenge

Our client, a leading PR agency, needed to understand how pre-teens and teenagers develop smartphone brand loyalty. This group increasingly controls their smartphone purchase decisions, and the platform aimed to uncover the factors influencing their decisions, including parental impact.

Key objectives included exploring smartphone usage patterns, identifying the features and USPs young users value, and understanding their brand loyalty journey. The platform sought insights into brand perceptions and associations to better understand why this cohort favors one smartphone brand over another.

Our Approach

To explore smartphone preferences and behaviours, we conducted an online ethnographic study over 7 days with kids aged 11-15 from the US, UK, and Germany. Participants engaged in a variety of diary tasks, providing video, image, and text responses alongside group discussions. This was complemented by in-depth interviews with millennial parents of younger children who had either recently purchased or were considering their child’s first smartphone.

The Outcome

The study provided valuable insights into the smartphone journey, highlighting the key factors that drive brand preference among younger audiences. It revealed the significant role smartphones play in the lives of kids aged 11-15, with clear differences in mobile behaviors between smartphone brand users. The research also identified the pivotal influence parents have in shaping tech choices, while pinpointing the moment when children begin to make independent decisions about their preferred brands.