Emerging Technologies and Shift in Consumers' Demand

While visiting a sports shop for buying some cricket stuff, I asked the shop keeper about the current trends for buying sports goods. “Shopkeeper spontaneously said that “Sir, Trend for buying sports goods is too low”

I asked him reason for such low trend in buying of sports goods,

He replied:

“Sir, Mobiles”!!! People are more interested in mobiles, laptops and indoor games”

This made me analyze different “Trend Shifts” in current markets.

Let us first check the reasons for these trend shifts in markets:

Reasons:

• Technological shifts: Technology has changed itself rapidly. Obsolete rate is much higher in technology market than ever before. Like any other country in the world, Pakistan has also been going through huge paradigm shift in technology and buying patterns of the buyers, which have changed over the years. Customer now focus more on tech products rather than sports goods, books, novels and so on.

Just recall the decade of 90’s, it was full of games, people loved to have sports’ hobbies like , Cricket , Football , Hockey , Tennis , Squash etc

Main shifts in Technology:

• Desktop –PC to Laptops
• Mobile Handsets to Smartphone Handsets
• Smartphone handsets to PDA’s
• Dial ups to Broadband
• Cable to Wireless
• TV Cable to Digital Cable TV
• Chat to Internet
• Physical Social Networks to Virtual Social networks
• Windows Mobile to iPhone
• IPhone to Android
• Atari Game to Nintendo
• Nintendo to Play station
• Play station to Play station 2 and then Play station 3
• Xbox to Xbox 360 and then Nintendo Wii

We can get as many examples as we want to quote here, by the way you can post any relevant example in the comments.

But these technological shifts have also made demand & buying pattern shifts in consumers as well. Now if you go in computer market, you will see people asking for laptops. You will see a significant crowd in the laptop shops instead of desktop PC’s shops.

Likewise, in mobile markets demand has been shifting to touch phones and Smartphone’s offering maximum mobility while on the Go. But still, reselling of Smartphone’s is low, and reason could be LAPTOP market.

Because, people do prefer to buy laptops instead of buying highly expensive Smartphone. But Smartphone and laptop customers are almost same in the sense of buying mobility in the hand.

You will find franchises of laptop manufacturers more than ever before.

If we visit different markets, we can observe different shifts in demands by observing technological goods placements (Technological Devices) in the shops and may able to draw below table:

Technology	Demand Shifted to	Market Demand	Demand Relevancy
Desktop –PC	Laptops	Seems High	Customers also prefer to buy Smartphone instead of buying laptop.
Mobile Handsets	Smartphone’s	Seems stable	Smartphone’s customers can also be a customer of a laptop market, because Smartphones & laptop prices are almost equal.
Dial ups	Broadband	Seems High	–
DSL Cable	Wireless	Seems High	–
TV Cable	Digital Cable TV	Seems High	–
Chat	Internet Browsing	Seems High	–
Physical Social Networks	Virtual Social Networks	Seems High	–
Windows Mobile	IPhone	Seems High	–
IPhone	Android	Still Unknown	–

Conclusion:

This all paradigm shift is not new or anything surprising, this was supposed to happen and it has happened before too!

Point that I wanted to project and discuss is, only those markets survived where people are more updated with the current trends and can easily evaluate future trends on the basis of current market situations.

I have seen in my local computer market, Computer Shopkeepers who used to offer desktop pc’s are now only dealing in laptops and likewise you can observe in mobile markets we have dedicated shops for Smartphone’s only.

This is how technologies shifts from previous state to new one and this is an unending market, where value of technology becomes obsolete very soon and customers’ demand also shift with shift in technology. Only those survive, who goes with the pace of it.