GOOGLE SEARCH TRENDS:
Romanians are shifting their interest from smartphones to laptops during Corona Crisis
This April, the interest in laptops surpassed the annual search peak of Black Friday 2019 by more than 30%.
Over the past month of April, the Google search for “laptop” peaked as the most used search term in the popular search category of computers & electronics. The keyword “laptop” recorded a popularity score of 100%, peaking during the end of April. Interestingly, the laptop search volume related to Coronavirus and work-from-home context surpassed like-to-like search queries recorded during Black Friday and Christmas 2019 by more than 30%.
Encompass Marketing Solutions (eMs), a management consulting group headquartered in the Netherlands, studied the Google search popularity of Romanians’ in relation to the most popular search queries for the category computers & electronics. Their study indicates that this sudden spike in laptop searches is related to the work-from-home trend, in the context of the Coronavirus crisis.
The study conducted by eMs in the first week of May, observed that the search query for “PC” also recorded a notable increase in Romanians’ search interest since the beginning of March.
Smartphones are not preferred for work-related purposes
Unlike laptops, smartphones did not experience the same surge in search volume, indicating clearly that for work-related purposes, laptops and PCs are still the devices to have. Searches for “iPhone” and “Samsung Galaxy” made a subtle recovery in mid April, but are still below average, and far behind searches related to laptops.
The study results also show that the marketplaces that Romanians go to for searching information and buying laptops are eMAG and Altex, the two top e-commerce websites in Romania.
Asus has the highest brand awareness in Romania
Encompass Marketing Solutions also compared the search popularity of laptop related queries used by Romanians, between October 2019 - April 2020.
According to the related laptop search queries, Romanians are mostly searching for the Asus brand, indicating that Asus is enjoying the highest brand popularity, even outperforming top searches like Emag (emag laptop) and Altex (Altex Laptop). The Chinese brand Lenovo also enjoyed a surge in interest, unlike HP that - although it rose in March - saw a decline in search popularity in April.
The data collected from Google Trends show that Romanians’ Google search preferences during the Corona crisis have changed, in correlation with the work-from-home trend and social distancing. In this period, people prefer to invest in laptops, to assure good working conditions from home, rather than on smartphones or other electronic devices.
About eMs
Encompass Marketing Solution https://www.e-marketing-s.com/, is a management consulting company headquartered in Haarlem, Netherlands, with subsidiaries in Bucharest, Romania and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. eMs specializes in all aspects of Customer Centricity for Superb Customer Experience Journeys, including: strategy, branding and service concepts, omni-channel retailing, digital journeys, e-commerce, and digitization.