Today's digital consumers use a veritable arsenal of personal technology to manage their lives. For example, in the US, over 60% of consumers carry smart phones with more computing power than the mainframes used by NASA to launch Apollo 11. Nearly half of these consumers use touch screen tablets, usually at home, to browse social networks, play games, and do a bit of window shopping or, increasingly, actual shopping, "TV rooms' have a TV but more and more it is connected to the internet through a game console, allowing consumers to stream and download shows on demand.

McKinsey's iConsumer research, now in its 5th year, details how these shifts and others in consumer digital behavior are becoming more pronounced and making it imperative, albeit challenging, for business in the High Tech, Media and Telecom (TMT) sectors to keep up. The shifts disrupt existing industry value chains and economics reflecting hundreds of billions of value while creating both opportunities and risks for companies of all shapes and sizes.

The iConsumer team assists top management in TMT and related industries in extracting and acting on insights uncovered through our proprietary research. That research entails extensive consumer surveys (over 200,000 during the past five years) spanning North America, Europe, Asia, Brazil, and select cities in Africa and the Middle East. Terabytes of iConsumer behavioral and transactional data from web usage, in-person observational research, and interviews can be analyzed to help companies make the right investments, whether based upon global, market, and customer segment level trends, or discreet consumer usage, buying factors, and attitudes.

The articles and reports derived from the iConsumer research to date reveal how digital has upended how we interact, how we entertain ourselves, how we buy, and how we work. For more on consumer and shopper insights as well as digital strategy visit our Marketing & Sales Practice and the Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum.