I am the founder and CEO of Argus Insights, a leader in Experience Analytics. Argus was started in stealth mode in 2008 to answer the question, "How can Market Research be improved and help drive innovation instead of validation?"I was the Executive Director of the ME310 Global Design Innovation Course at Stanford University. The course has a forty year history of developing tomorrow’s innovation leaders.Formerly I was the Chief Technologist for SK Telecom America’s R&D Group. In this role I was responsible for understanding how the rapidly changing technology landscape would enable SK Telecom to craft new business opportunities in the Americas. My areas of responsibility ranged from NGN wireless technologies (LTE vs WiMaxx, etc), handheld experiences & the interface technologies that enable them (multitouch touchscreens, haptic feedback, smartphone operating systems), as well as evolving influences on the telecommunications market (cloud computing, femtocells, CDN’s, LBS, SNS, etc.) I also supported SKTA’s internal Business Development & Corporate Venture Capital organizations.Prior to my role at SKTA, I led Synaptics efforts for developing next generation capabilities for handheld devices from within the marketing organization. I was responsible for developing a comprehensive competitive landscape for the various handheld markets, with specific focus on the mobile ecosystem, driving the product & technology strategy, in partnership with the engineering organization, to architect & execute our roadmap of future capabilities.I was also the architect of the Onyx Concept Phone, the world’s first multitouch mobile experience. I worked with the top handset manufacturers on the creation of tomorrow’s handsets, ensuring the right marriage of technology & user experience takes place as we see an industry transformation take place around multitouch technologies.
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.
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.
Social Media offers more varieties of Spam than even Hormel!
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.
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 Galaxy S4 Wilts During Spring Launch
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.
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.
While much has been made of Apple’s apology to China for their dismal support of iPhone users, the bigger story is why the great Apple would apologize to any consumers after years of “if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you” marketing. Apple’s losing social capital in their current strongholds. Our analysis of demand side metrics show not only that Samsung and RIM are beating Apple soundly in the battle for hearts and minds but that the rate of iPhone 5 adoption hiccuped after the Galaxy S IV launch.
Our analysis shows Apple losing steam in the US, with the new Z10 from BlackBerry being perceived as a superior experience to the iPhone and evidence that both iPhone and Galaxy S III owners holding their breath for the upcoming Galaxy S IV launch in May. We see evidence that existing iPhone customers are moving to the Z10 and considering the S IV to replace their aging iPhones, a move sure to bleed revenue and loyalty from Apple.
If you’d like to be part of the Smartphone forecast beta we’re launching at the beginning of May, reach out at sales@argusinsights.com and we’ll get you on the list for the weekly forecast.
Beware the Ides of March said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar before he was brutally murdered by his customers. With the launch of the Galaxy S IV, the same could have been said for Samsung. The fanfare around the launch was new for Samsung, seeking to gather as many eyeballs as Apple does for their cryptic events. While tech pundits complained about the mash-up betweenMad Men and Leave it to Beaver (rightfully so it seems), Argus Insights was busy understanding how the big S compared to the big A with their Big Apple (pardon the pun) event.
When we compared the hourly social mention volume between the iPhone 5 launch in September 2012 and the March 14, 2013 launch of the Samsung Galaxy S IV, there is no comparison. The iPhone 5 event attracted almost 10X the buzz of Samsung. Samsung did beat out RIM’s BB10 launch in January by a fair margin, almost 2X.
So little surprise that Samsung wasn’t able to compete with the iPhone 5 launch. The silver lining is that Samsung didn’t have the post launch fall off that Apple or RIM did.
When we normalize for the days prior the launch, though Samsung comes in third place, meaning that both Apple and RIM had bigger lifts in social media in comparison. While the RIM overall volume may have been the lowest, it was a big event for them, pushing proportionally more awareness than the Samsung event.
How will this translate to sales of the Galaxy S IV? Reach out to Argus Insights to find out. We’ll be releasing our new Smartphone and Tablet Demand Side Forecast in the middle of Q2. Email if you’d like a free copy of the inaugural issue, sales@argusinsights.com.
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?
