May 2013

As the Smartphone market matures, user expectations are starting to fragment. Handsets that cater to these evolving niches are beating the iPhone.

Apple is a big fish in a shrinking pond

Contrary to popular belief, the iPhone’s aren’t the highest rated devices on the market. While the competitors have broad product portfolios that a mix of hit and miss, this allows them to tailor a handset to the diversity of consumers while the first thing iPhone customers do is buy a case to personalize it. I agree their focus on profitability is keeping the market share limited. The fact that Verizon sold as many iPhone 4S as iPhone 5 demonstrates that for iPhone fans, the only thing better than the iPhone 5 is a cheaper iPhone 4S. They have also been losing the experience innovation battle, focusing their launches on cool technical features such as camera components or silicon rather than moving the user experience forward. Even Henry Ford’s vaulted, “any color you want as long as it’s black” strategy had to give way to diverse offerings. You can see the narrowly defined handsets are delighting consumers more, in large part due to the strong point of view they take on the mobile experience.

Time and time again, as markets mature, the dominate experiences have to fragment to address the refined niche needs of the market. Galaxy Note does that very well while the Facebook phone didn’t. The Note phones added capabilities that integrated into the mobile experience. The Facebook phone took over the mobile experience, forcing consumers into an even more constrained experience. It’s time for Apple to find ways to fragment their walled garden or else iPhone users will continue to dig their way out.

via Apple’s Incredible Profits And Small Market Share – Business Insider.

Being Number One is Better Than Being First, Ask HTC

There’s been a lot of traffic about the HTC One, how HTC is ramping production. Wired’s latest issue even includes a sidebar on this latest smackdown between Apple’s iPhone and “insert name possible contender into blank here” handset. With all the focus on the Galaxy S4 “failure to launch” (think crashing rocket more than Terry Bradshaw’s derrier) it was easy to miss the triumphant return of HTC to the market.

The HTC One is now the top rated smartphone launched in the past three months. Only the aging Galaxy Note II is viewed as a more delightful experience. Given the failure of the so-called Facebook phone to delight the market along with the fizzle of the Galaxy S4, brand is not enough for consumers, the product has to deliver on the promise of the brand story. So the question is, will Apple’s next entrant into the smartphone battle for hearts and minds deliver a compelling new experience like the One or technical gimics that fade quickly like the Galaxy S4?

Sign up to be the first to know this an other shifts in the ecosystem from the mouths of consumers, not experts, when we launch the Argus Insights Smartphone Voice of the Market Demand Report… And we promise to make the title shorter.

Spamalot, a social media drama in three acts

There’s a problem in social media analytics today. Spam. Spam in more flavors and varieties than even Hormel has produced to satisfy the crazed cravings of the market. The first type of spam we see is classic ecommerce ads. Acer Laptop replacement batteries, iPhone 4 cases, Kindle Fire starter, you name it. We did a brand audit of Best Buy in August 2012 and found that over 30% of all Best Buy mentions contained links to Amazon.com.

Right before the holidays, Facebook users became party to one of the single largest ecommerce spam campaigns we’ve seen in our customer work. Amazon Affiliate Bob Douplein, or an agent acting on his behalf, found a way to post the entire Amazon.com product catalogue on millions of public Facebook profiles, over 14.4 million according to Google. This had a huge impact on accurately tracking brand perception by users for our customers for such obvious spam, but Bob’s Page Rank improved. Tactics like this emerge faster than Facebook or Twitter can respond which means bad data leaks into everyone’s social streams. This is part of the reason we don’t charge our customers per mention like the other guys but instead go for broad terms and help narrow to what’s really consumers and what’s not.

The second type of spam we’re seeing more and more are Twitter Bots and the family tree for this branch of spam is getting more and more diverse as the bot makers get more creative. The first bots we were seeing were retweet bots, types that searched the twittersphere for content related to either keywords or specific authors and then just blindly retweet. The number of @engadget, @verge, @mashable retweet bots just boggles the mind. Some articles are legitimately retweeted by actual humans that like the piece and want to share it out but more are bot driven. These bots are mostly benign and help drive awareness for mostly interesting content.

A second type of twitter bot we’ve seen are those masquerading as real people. They typically have few followers but somehow manage to tweet every 5-15 seconds, and in multiple languages! Sure I might speak English, a bit of Japanese and my native Arkansan but these are twitter users that routinely tweet in Indonesian, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, English and French on the same day! What’s even more insidious about these tweets is that they are shared across a network of bots which means the individual tweets are copied across multiple accounts in pseudo random ways to spread the message broader.
I could go on but I’ll wait for another post to do so. The third act is what we’re doing about the spam in social media. We’re slowly building our arsenal of spam detectors to separate the wheat from the chaff, and ensuring our clients have the purest feeds of their consumers to base their decisions. What type of spam have you been fighting in social? Together we can make social media represent the true Voice of Market rather than a precursor to SkyNet.

Biggest Winner of Samsung Galaxy S4 launch? iPhone 5!

We’ve checked our math over twenty times, gone back to the sources to verify what we’re seeing in the data from the market, but there’s no other conclusion we can draw, the Galaxy S4 is having what can only be termed a terrible launch. What? How can we say that? The S3 was the biggest threat to the iPhone 5 since the iPhone 4S!
See it for yourself, the demand for S4 is much slower than the same time frame as its competitors.

Samsung has fallen into the same trap as Apple where the only thing consumers wanted more than a new iPhone 5 was a cheaper iPhone 4S. The same logic seems to playing itself out for the Galaxy S4, with a surge in response to both the S3 and iPhone 5.

S4Wilts — Samsung Galaxy S4 Now Ranked Below iPhone 5

We saw the market demand pause when the S4 was announced back in market (you can see the iPhone 5 bubble shrink a bit) but as soon as the S4 was available, iPhone 5 surged. Part of this is challenges in continuous innovating the user experience (eye tracking is like Siri, novel at first taste but annoying after), partly due to Apple getting aggressive with iPhone 5 promotions, rolling up their sleeves and wading into the brand wars everyone else is fighting.
The smartphone market is insanely dynamic. Waiting for quarterly reports means you miss the chance to take advantage of these changes. That’s why Argus Insights tracks the market continuously. Look for our soon to be released weekly consumer demand report.