More worries, more time, more talk

Reputable out-of-warranty motor repair workshops such as BNS (that's Boxburg Noise and Sound and not the Bank of Nova Scotia), are flying, while the latter is buggered. But back to BNS, having seen an upswing in price-sensitive customers whom are not ready or not willing to upgrade their cars, the sector is booming.

Jokingly, a friend in the industry remarked that this phemonon has brought culture and classes closer together. He said he's never met a yuppie banker before, but now they're coming through the doors in droves, many of whom are for the first time experiencing life outside of a motor-plan.

Similar upswings

Similar upswings are predictably taking place in sales of alcohol and anti-depressants. And, not so predictably, in publishing, the sales of UK brand Mills & Boon books have gone through the roof. It seems our need to escape to a fantasy world of cigarette smoking heroes and damsels in distress is on the up and up, as is the security industry which is also enjoying steady increases in revenues as people bump up home security in response to a global increase in crime.

However, the most interesting trend to date has been the increase in ARPU or average revenue per user in the mobile phone industry.

Some in the industry would have us believe that this is a direct result of the uptake of new generation applications such as MMS, video calling and 3G roaming. But the more honest in the industry will tell you that the increase in business is simple driven by the fact that people seem to be talking more - a trend which has taken many in the local and international markets by surprise.

No precedent

There has been no precedent for this; the last time the global economy was in recession was in the early '90s and the cellphone industry was in its infancy, with no more than a few million subscribers across the planet. Now, with markets like India adding somewhere in the region of a million subscribers a month across their many networks, the mobile telephony market is in a vastly different space.

But it's not the numbers that are important; it's the social and cultural behaviors that are driving the increase in talk time that are worthy of reflection on what it means for marketing and communication in the mobile sector.

The basic parameters of this hypothesis are multi-faceted.

First, is it that people are talking more during these times because they have a psychology desire to vent their feelings more frequently and thus need to engage their fellow man to create discourse and solution to what is troubling them? Is it also because we have more time? Many formerly “busy” people are now working four-day weeks and quite simply have more time on their hands and thus have more time to call friends and family to discuss the mundane and ordinary.

Have we become soft?

Or is it because, as a species we have become soft and overly emotional? The men and women of yesteryear simply got on with it when times were tough, in contrast with today where we have become a society of needy, emotionally unstable individuals whose religion is consumerism and, in the absence of the ability to worship at the altar, we feel we're on shaky ground and thus need to talk more.

Or, as is more likely the case, is the reality an interwoven mesh of emotionally driven behaviors that has us on the phone more frequently, with conversations that historically took 60 seconds now taking five minutes?

Looking at the situation through a financial lens, if one does the math and works out the financial benefit to the mobile industry of a customer increasing his or her talk time by a multiple of three, four or five, the financial upswing is massive. Thus it's not inconceivable for conspiracy theorists among us to suggest that the current global recession was secretly funded by the likes of Vodafone and Telefonica in order to address the need to increase revenues. Of course, these are the same conspiracy theorists that believe that Elvis is still alive and well and living in Vietnam with two wives and six kids.

Commissioning

Practically, if the mobile industry hasn't done so already, they should be commissioning social and cultural anthropologists to undertake a study to determine the specific reasons for this increase in our need to talk more culture by culture, country by country.

In the mean time, the question begs, “Should mobile operators subtly be promoting doom and gloom through an increase in advertising to realise increases in revenues or should they covertly be encouraging the ongoing recruitment of pathological and amoral sociopaths in the financial sector to ensure the world'ss global economy stays in the poop for as long as possible? Who's to know?

But what we do know is that we are indeed speaking more. In a time when the world sits on the brink of an economic disaster, can it really be a bad thing that we are phoning our mothers to find out what's for supper, texting our friends to get together on the weekend and generally communicating more with our loved ones?