Business and Marketing

Seventy percent of consumers hop from desktop to smartphone to tablet when researching products. More than half of them, though, consummate the sale in-store.

The digital path to purchase traverse several devices.

Tron, the early Digital Age movie in which Jeff Bridges actually enters a mainframe and traverses its circuitry in a neon hockey uniform may now be considered kitsch. But the truth is that, some 30 years after the film's release, we all have something in common with Bridges' Kevin Flynn: Our lives are palpably interwoven with digital technology.

A path to purchase study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of cross-screen technology provider Tapad paints this ubiquitous picture of the influence of connected devices: 5% of Americans rock six of them, 14% use five; 22% do four; and 30% have three. In other words, shopping forays for 70% of consumers ply a route of desktop to tablet to smartphone. When it comes to transactions, however, brick-and-mortar stores are still involved in the majority of them.

Forrester's surveys of 1,500 connected consumers found that two thirds of them discovered products via digital channels. To learn more about prospective purchases, 44% of them turned to search engines and 28% to retail websites. But then it was off to the mall (or the phone) for 50% of shoppers. Another 15% said they ordered online but picked their items up in-store.

Digital is clearly the route for marketers to take in their first miles on the path, Forrester says, and here's the easy part: It doesn't much matter which vehicle you use. In the product discovery phase, 46% of consumers said they used laptops and 33% hooked into a desktop/smartphone combination. During product research, it was 51% laptop and 41% phone-and-desktop combo. Fourteen percent used tablets for investigating details.

The hard part for marketers in negotiating the digital path, Forrester points out, is keeping messaging relevant and consistent for each consumer across all digital touchpoints. The researcher offers three suggestions:

Maintain context during discovery. No matter what device they're on, 28% of consumers expect to see consistent ads, 23% want ads tailored to content they're viewing, and 21% welcome location-specific messages.

Practice device-optimization during exploration. More than half of those surveyed said they want to see consistent content that's optimized for whatever screen they happen to be on.

Make the purchase experience consistent. The majority of shoppers who've signed into retail sites expect to be recognized when migrating to other devices. One fifth of those surveyed demand this level of attention even when they haven't logged in.

Business Breaking News: Lenovo ThinkPad 10: Top 5 Business Features

Lenovo's ThinkPad 10 is a versatile business tablet with tons of handy accessories to make you more productive. The 10.1-inch Windows 8.1 slate improves upon last year's ThinkPad Tablet 2 with hardware upgrades and a better keyboard dock. Plus, the ThinkPad 10 remains one of the few tablets that ship with a stylus, letting you write notes and draw charts right on the display. It's also compatible with Lenovo's desktop dock, which lets you use the device like a desktop computer when you're back in the office. And while it's not the fastest business tablet around, it delivers good performance for daily use. Check out a full review of the Lenovo ThinkPad 10 on our sister site Laptop Mag, or read on for five features that make it great for business.

Hardware upgrades

Lenovo's new ThinkPad slate is much faster than last year's model, packing a relatively speedy quad-core processor with 4GB of RAM. That provides pretty fast performance and smooth multitasking compared to the ThinkPad Tablet 2. It's not as speedy as premium slates such as the Surface Pro 3, but it's much more affordable; the ThinkPad 10 starts at $599, while the Surface Pro 3 starts at $799. The ThinkPad 10 also sports a brighter, sharper display than its predecessor, with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels. Other hardware highlights include either 64GB or 128GB of onboard storage, depending on which configuration you choose.

Commodity Online News: India Budget: Rupee to trade with positive bias over medium term