Impact of Voice Search on Consumer Behavior

Back in the day, every household possessed an edition of ‘Yellow Pages’ as its go-to source for information about local businesses and services. It was the giant yellow book lying next to your fixed telephone with the contact information of literally every single business in and around your city. About a century later into its existence, the Internet happened. With the dawn of the Digital age, traditional print mediums quickly began to phase out, and the Yellow Pages scrambled to move their vast collections of contact information onto the web. Google search engine revolutionized the search process and facilitated the process to quickly access the right and relevant information.

Twenty-odd years into the existence of google search, we are now seeing a massive evolution in the search industry which may spell an end for the conventional search on digital platforms. Voice search & digital assistant will dictate and drive the search process in the coming years and mark the beginning of the end for organic search.  Before understanding the voice search from a commercial perspective, it’s imperative to understand the reason behind this shift. According the google research, top reasons why users turn to voice-activated speakers are: 1) Multitasking 2) Less time consumption 3) Instant responses 4) Facilitates daily routine.

With the advent of voice search devices such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod we’re experiencing a fast-paced future of information processing. This technology has equally infiltrated other areas of daily-life – in cars, fridges and furniture. The numbers are encouraging. According to ComScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2022 and 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020. As more & more consumers prefer voice searches over text, a broader effect on the consumer behavior is coming to life. People are using their devices to multitask in the home – playing music, asking for advice, weather updates, news alerts, appointments and what not.

According to the report published by Technavio, voice recognition market will be a $600 million industry by 2019. Millennials are the prime drivers of this market with over 36% of them using voice-enabled devices atleast once a month as opposed to just 10% of baby boomers. These figures are expected to touch 40% for millennials in 2019. Currently, 5% of consumers use voice shopping but this could rise exponentially to 50% by 2022 according to MoffettNathanson. In addition, 1 in 5 consumers have made voice purchases through digital home assistants and another 33% intend to do so in the coming year as per Walker Sands.

With all these promising figures, A marketer’s first instinct would be to ask the question on monetization opportunities. For businesses to monetize voice search, they need to understand that, currently, it’s a very niche and complicated segment; but that this will change at breakneck speed than most businesses will be able to react to, as and when relevant monetization models are deployed & executed. Being the first mover and staying ahead of your game has its own perks. Domino’s, for example, created a skill for Amazon’s Alexa to order pizza. Burger King, on the other hand, executed a cheeky ad with the “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” campaign to force voice users to listen to their product offering. Although short-lived, these stunts helped them gain enough media attention to ruffle some feathers in the fast-food world.

The lessons and takeaways for the businesses right now, and to a lesser degree the opportunity, is to beef-up your online presence by adhering to standardized structured data formats (local business information data, product catalogues, key words etc.) as well as to implement quality content that is more conversational in tone, i.e. ironing out FAQs. Google has already leveraged plethora of data points it has, including the use of local inventory ad data to provide users directions to the local store stocking products they wish to purchase.

As voice-search assistants, through machine learning & Artificial Intelligence, begin to comprehend emotion and state of mind through tone & depth of your voice and behavioral patterns, suggestions, and references will be less grounded to explicit intent by the user. An evolution that will haul up the extent to which we will be marketing to machines rather than humans in the near future.

Srikrishnan Shivakumar