Smartphone consumer and business trends in 2014

 

In this post we’ll be looking at how mobile trends are effecting customers, network operators and handset manufacturers. Last week, Analysys Mason reported “[t]he average amount of time that consumers spend using smartphones per day almost doubled between 2011 and 2013, from 98 minutes to 195 minutes”. The time spent actually communicating with other human beings has increased during this period, but only with overall growth in use. As a relative share of what other things consumers do with their smartphones, communication has actually fallen (see above image), from a 49% to 25% share. Retailers will be very happy to see that the “utilities and commerce” share seems to have grown considerably.

72% of those that Analysys Mason surveyed across the UK, US, France and Germany were said to be using OTT messaging services on their phone. These over the top services are posing a real threat to traditional operators. One particular example that caught Zeitgeist’s attention was that of FreedomPop in the US, a virtual network operator that uses Sprint’s network to piggyback off. According to GigaOm, the company has launched an iOS app, that assigns you a unique telephone number and allows you to run all your communications through a “virtual phone”, circumventing the carrier. The answer for carriers may be in bundling services, and indeed BT and Vodafone seem to leaning toward this as a tactic. But a Lex column article in the Financial Times warns that although bundling services into a quad-play offer can increase retention, it usually means offering those same services at a discount.

Cheap smartphones are nothing new in of themselves; competitors to Samsung and Apple have been scrounging away at the bottom of the market for some years now, and it was way back in 2012 at the Mobile World Congress that Mozilla announced it would make a cheap handset for developing economies. What has changed recently is the explosive growth at this end of the market. By 2018, more handsets will have been shipped that sell for under $200 than those that sell above that amount (see chart below), according to IDC and The Economist, who wrote about it recently. As the paper pointed out,

People buying their first smartphones today, perhaps to replace a basic handset, care less about the brand and more about price than the richer, keener types of a few years ago. They are likely to pay less for a nice new smartphone than they did for their shabby old device, because the cost of making smartphones has tumbled.

Part of the problem for incumbents is that they have had to do all the R&D, which new entrants can learn from and improve on without worrying about such fixed costs. For consumers though, with fragmentation at both ends of the market, the choice and price of smartphones has never been better.

Microsoft’s ‘New Coke’ moment – On knowing when your customer is dissatisfied

Microsoft has been trying its hand at a bit of innovation of late in an attempt to raise some of its lost brand equity, and stem the larger market decline in PC sales, which has recently started accelerating. (On a side note, Deloitte have a caveat to these figures, saying the true measurement is in usage, not units).

One of the ways this innovation has come about is in the release of its Surface product, which has interested many but earned the ire of erstwhile manufacturing partners as Microsoft has pursued its own path, making the product in-house. Its new operating system, Windows 8, has struggled to gain traction with consumers. The president of Fujitsu, one of Microsoft’s partners, declared interest to be “weak” back in December last year. The most obvious step-change from previous iterations is the slate screen that greets users upon booting up. On proceeding through this, users then come to a more familiar Windows layout.

In yesterday’s Financial Times, Microsoft said it was preparing to “reverse course over key elements of its Windows 8 operating system”. Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty was quoted as saying it is the biggest marketing fiasco since New Coke. The only difference being, Doherty comments, that Coca-Cola acknowledged their error three months in, whereas Microsoft is pushing eight months now since launch; Coca-Cola conversely paid more attention to what its customers were saying about the product. “The learning curve is definitely real”, said head of marketing and finance for the Windows business, Tami Reller.

IDC research tells a discouraging story for businesses relying on PC sales

Today’s FT featured an editorial entitled “Steve Ballmer was right to gamble on change”. Opening with a quotation by Bill Gates, saying that to “win big you sometimes have to take big risks”, the editorial cites Kodak as a primary example of a company that refused to take risk, and ended up succumbing to creative destruction at the expense of trying to protect legacy revenue streams. We’ve written before about Kodak and creative destruction. The editorial calls for a revival of a “climate of creativity” at the company, and certainly that is what Ballmer is trying to instill, very nobly and with good reason. Zeitgeist’s bone of contention is with the following, seemingly logical statement,

“…disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology does not appeal to traditional customers. Instead, it appeals to the customers of the future.”

We would argue that Microsoft’s customer base is made up overwhelmingly of what might be considered “traditional” customers. Users who find familiarity with a long-established incumbent, who have no interest in OS alternatives like Linux, Apple, Android or Mozilla. They are not looking for a revolution. By all means change your product, but it must evolve, not look like a completely different way of computing when you switch it on. This point is confirmed nicely by a recent piece in Harvard Business Review, which details how to get customers to value your product more. The author, Heidi Grant Halvorson, describes the importance of knowing the right emotional fit for your customers’ mindset. The article elaborates,

“motivational focus — whether he tends to view his goals as ideals and opportunities to advance (what researchers call “promotion focus”), or as opportunities to stay safe and keep things running smoothly (“prevention focus”). While everyone has a mix of both to some extent, most of us tend to have a dominant focus.”

We would argue that users that prefer Microsoft Windows OS to other systems would strongly fall into the latter category. Change is perhaps inevitable, but Microsoft are choosing a precarious path with such radical changes aimed at a group little interested in such fundamental alterations to the way they interact with such an integral device.