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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Men talk longer, faster buying on cellphone

By: Byron Acohido

Posted: 02/16/2013 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 | Last Modified: 02/16/2013 10:59 AM | Updates

A study found men talked longer on cellphones than women, and also that they talked more and faster. (JUNJI KUROKAWA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES)

SEATTLE -- Men talk longer and faster than women when using their cellphone to buy stuff from retailers, according to results of a study released Friday by Marchex, a mobile advertising company.

This bit of intel, no doubt, will be pored over by retailers and tech companies hustling to promote so-called mobile commerce, or m-commerce -- the fledging retailing sector that's being hotly pursued by Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and others.

ABI Research says the m-commerce market could account for 24.4 per cent of overall e-commerce revenue by the end of 2017, a big leap forward from 2011, when the mobile online commerce market doubled in size to $65.6 billion. That growth is being fuelled by the rapid adoption of smartphones globally and by a push from bricks-and-mortar retailers to reach mobile-device users with sales campaigns and systems, according to ABI.

Marchex aggregated data points from more than 200,000 phone calls placed to U.S. businesses -- the majority of which came from mobile phones -- and found men speak 13 per cent longer on the phone and that they're more talkative.

On average, male callers stayed on the phone for seven minutes, 23 seconds and women for six minutes, 30 seconds. The study also found men spoke more and faster than women did.

The average male caller spoke 236 words per call at 32 words per minute and the average female spoke 227 words per call at a rate of 24 words per minute. The data also showed men tend to make more calls at the beginning of the day, whereas women prefer to make more calls after lunch.

"When more purchasing decisions than ever are taking place through mobile channels, knowing what's true and what isn't can profoundly affect how businesses interact with men and women," says Eric Taylor, senior analyst at the Marchex Institute.

"Madison Avenue has long produced ad campaigns to target men and women," Taylor says. "But gender-based assumptions -- such as women spend more time on the phone than men -- must be looked at dead in the eye and proven with data."

-- USA Today

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 16, 2013 B6

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Updated on Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 10:59 AM CST: replaces photo

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