Less is more, when it comes to smartphones
At the moment, we’re particularly focused on two themes:
- ‘Less is More’ – how you can get the most value out of product creation (R&D) by offering fewer products, with fewer features, spending less on in-house R&D resources and working less hard
- ‘Get Smart!’ – what the future of convergence looks like: smartphones + ‘cloud services’ + advanced/premium infotainment (video and apps) + smart home hub
The two come together in a recent survey by Best Buy:
“…a large portion of adults in America plan to buy a smartphone in the next 12 months. However, many barriers stand in their way, including confusion about the technology, the shopping experience and price.”
“Of adults who do not yet own a smartphone, nearly half (47%) claimed they are too confused by the vast assortment of models and features.”
Big takeaway: if you make things too complicated and offer customers too many confusing choices, they won’t buy. The key to portfolio management is not allocating the available resources, but optimizing the choices that you offer to customers.
Moreover, the survey also confirms one of our key themes; when it comes to apps for consumers, entertainment is critical:
“More than half (58%) feel it is important to be able to listen to music on their mobile phone. Forty-one percent feel it is important to be able to engage in social networking such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. And 36% said being able to play games is important.”
Not much reported, but fascinating because it speaks to the key economic question of share of wallet, was the fact that most consumers would give up alcohol rather than give up their mobile phone:
“Six in ten (60%) of those surveyed shared they would rather abstain from alcohol for a week than give up their mobile phone”
This says that mobile phones and smartphones can take share from other categories of seeming unrelated spending. Unless we now categorize smartphones primarily under entertainment, along with drinking and socializing…
