Round 2 goes to the Nook Tablet, Fire customers rage on reliability and hardware
In the two weeks prior to Black Friday, both Amazon and Barnes & Noble released their new Android based Tablets into the wild, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet. Both have garnered significant attention not only for their competitive pricing against the iPad2 but also for the ties into their respective e-reader ecosystems. The chart below is the latest Buzz and Delight Landscape for the top rated tablets available today.
Notice that the buzz volume around the Kindle Fire eclipses all other tablets in the market place, including the iPad 2. This is normal for Kindle fans to be ravenous about new Amazon products. The original Kindle has more reviews than any other product in the Amazon store. Even with all of this buzz, the Kindle Fire is not the highest rated tablet on the market. In fact, as seen in the Delight Landscape below, the Nook Tablet, though lower in overall buzz volume is delighting its early adopters more than the average Kindle Fire user, indicating that something about the Nook experience is ahead of the Kindle Fire experience
When we drill deeper into the experience by understand how consumers view the product features and other aspects of the experience, we start to understand why these distinctions exist. When we compare the perceptions of usage between the Fire and Nook, some of these distinctions pop out. In the Attribute Funnel below, the Kindle Fire is the top bar and the Nook Tablet is the lower bar for each user scenario reported. You’ll see that Amazon users are more delighted by the e-book experience than Nook users
though Nook Tablet users are clearly delighted by the movie experience on the Nook Tablet.
When we compare the top ten most discussed aspects of the user experience we start to see additional reasons the Nook seems to be winning out over the Fire in the Attribute Funnel below.
While this ranking is based on the Kindle Fire top ten most mentioned experience aspects, it is still telling how the Nook Tablet differs from the Fire at a hardware level. User perceptions of the Nook speed and display quality are high above that of the Kindle Fire. The most telling difference is in perceptions of reliability where the Kindle Fire clearly loses to the Nook Tablet.
A deeper dive into these results is available on the Argus Insights Consumer Innovation Analytics (CIA) platform. With full platform access, you can compare these new tablets to the iPad2 or track performance against the entire tablet product category. Clients can drill down to the actual user verbatims that drive the results shared in the visualizations above. Please contact us if you would like to have full access to the Tablet Category and see which companies are delivering holiday smiles instead of sacks of coal.
