The Impact of Smartphones, Barcode Scanning, and Location-based Services on Consumers’ Search Behavior

With their barcode scanning capabilities, positioning technologies and internet access smartphones converge online and offline world in consumers’ search. Combining context-specific information with consumer search data allows us to measure how consumers search on the mobile Internet. Our research objective is to investigate the drivers of consumer search on the mobile Internet. We use a novel and unique behavioral data set from a mobile location-based smartphone product information (i.e., barcode scanning) application. Our data comprises more than 200 million observations at the individual consumer level. Our preliminary results provide insights in consumer search behavior using smartphones. We show that information needs differ by the type of products that are scanned. We expect that our findings will give marketers a better understanding of consumers’ search behavior and thus help companies to proactively target them with marketing programs in order to acquire “search prone consumers” and to better retain existing consumers.