The 572,000 searches carried out on Pagine Gialle.it in March 2010
show a growing sector in spite of the crisis

Turin, 12 April 2010 – SEAT Pagine Gialle has decided to publish the results of the Monitoring Centre for the home furnishings sector to coincide with the Milan Furniture Fair, the eagerly awaited international event dedicated to design that is currently enlivening the city of Milan.

More than 16 million searches carried out every month by PagineGialle.it® portal's users show a very sound sector, that does not seem affected by the crisis.
An impressive 572,000 home furnishing-related searches were performed in March 2010, a sign of a great Italian passion exported throughout the world. The most common key word was "furniture," which was used four times more often than in March 2009, followed by "retail home furnishings," which also was used much more frequently than one year earlier.

Milan seems to have succumbed to design fever (Furniture Fair fever, to be more precise): searches by the city's Internet surfers have more than doubled compared to one year ago, marking an increase of 120%. This is only to be expected, given that Milan is the province of Italy with the deepest ties to the design and furniture industry. Searches originating in the area exceed the national average by 23%. This highly meaningful figure is followed by that for Veneto, whose citizens carry out searches using key words such as "furniture" or "furnishing accessories" 20% more often than the national average.
Among the cities, Turin registered the strongest growth over the past year: searches related to the subject were essentially up tenfold in March 2010, making for a volume 10% higher than in the rest of Italy.

What do Italian people look for? Comfort and creativity for their bathrooms and bedrooms; the most convenient expenditure is for screens.
Most users employ generic search terms, but some more specific key words do not fail to surprise and point to particular market trends.
The most successful searches are those for "bathroom furnishings," confirming that the bathroom remains the favourite place in which to employ creativity and seek out comfort by choosing "bathtubs" or "shower stalls" with all of the accessories, in addition to "curtains," "rugs," "sinks" and "mirrors."
The top-ten most searched-for words also include "mattresses" and "couches," because being comfortable remains a top priority for Italians. Yet it is all useless if you cannot sleep peacefully: Italians are preparing themselves for the summer season and the customary mosquito invasion by immediately searching for information on how to install new and effective "screens," the use of which as a search term was up 66%.

The brands of desire and everyday furniture
Lastly, a great number of direct searches are aimed at fashionable brands and retailers, and it is no surprise that IKEA is at the top of this list: the well-known Swedish home furnishing manufacturer is even near the top ten most searched for terms, followed by the specialized stores Mercatone Uno and Emmelunga.
The most common search for high-quality furniture and designer articles is "design firms." Italian brands are at the fore of up-market brands of interest to Internet surfers, with Calligaris and Natuzzi in the lead.

SEAT PG
The SEAT Pagine Gialle Group is one of the main operators at world level in the sector of multimedia profiled advertising, offering "print-voice-online" directories, as well as complementary communication services such as one-to-one marketing. SEAT Pagine Gialle has been engaged in information services and search and communications tools for over 80 years. It is a success story based on a brand that is familiar to everyone, a sales network employing over 2,000 persons, a technology that is constantly evolving and a database that includes 13 million households and 4 million businesses (2009 data), and a wide range of products guaranteeing a real integrated system of communications to about 500,000 Italian Customers: a total of 53 million volumes distributed to the homes and offices (2009 data), about 29 million enquiries through the directory assistance service (2009 data), and about 323 million hits on online directories (2009 data) connect people and businesses, bringing together needs and solutions and promoting economic exchanges.

Press contacts:   

Seat PG: 
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Burson-Marsteller

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jacques.capizzi@bm.com
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