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Mobile phones are miracles of technology. But do many of them emphasise features rather than benefits? Does it matter?

In the late 1990s, after one of the major consumer food groups in the UK had a stumble, I asked a mate who worked there what had really gone wrong.

‘Mother-in-law research,’ she said. The company, though by then in the FTSE 100, had grown up as a family firm and retained that culture for far too long. ‘Family business’ is often an oxymoron. According to my insider, the CEO was not only an autocrat (common with dynasties) but was in the habit of trying out new lines of high-margin ready meals on his mother-in-law.

If she liked it, the Chicken Madras Taramasalata went into production – and if not, not – no matter what the regional test marketing results revealed. Since the mother-in-law couldn’t be sacked, belatedly the non-executives gave the CEO the ‘opportunity’ to jump.

Such research is not confined to in-laws. My favourite example arose when quizzing a business-plan team on why they had elected to concentrate on developing an application for mobile phones that enabled you to find restaurants when out skiing:
‘Our survey shows strong demand for this service.’
‘Who did you survey?’
‘Other students in the Business School.’

Which told you what you know already about the denizens of biz schools but not a lot about the real market for silo mobile applications.

Today, I’m behaving even worse than either the deposed CEO or the MBAs because I’ve been conducting consumer research on myself (n = 1). And I’ve just taken delivery of a new mobile handset, my third in two years.

Now, this handset is a Nokia 95 (the ‘do anything phone’) and my previous ones were Motorola (2005) and Sony Ericsson (2006). Point 1 is that learning how to use the interface requires a fair commitment of time with each new manufacturer, which is one reason why many users seem to stick with a single handset brand in the way that used to be the case with cars. Loyalty to car brands diminishes partly as the controls behind the wheel become increasingly interchangeable across manufacturers (think of your last airport hire-car); loyalty to handsets remains strong.

Point 2 springs from the fact that the Nokia has an amazing range of applications. You could search the web, watch TV, manage your calendar, listen to music, take photographs, send email and even talk to people. Two days into using the Nokia, I still have that uncomfortable feeling that a basic rule of marketing is being broken: only sell on benefits, not features.

How many of these features will be used on a regular basis by a lot of consumers? At some point, does more become less and would you pay a premium for simplicity? Perhaps it depends, as so often, on which type of consumer you are in terms of ‘Crossing the Chasm’, Geoffrey Moore’s pioneering analysis of marketing disruptive products to mainstream consumers – a book to be reviewed in a future blog entry for CandidCapital.

Point 3: which analogies from the business world of the past 50 years help us most to understand the many ways in which mobile changes how we operate? During the internet bubble and before broadband became widespread, surfing the web at home was so slow it became a chore. Now as 3G is rolled out, a handset smaller than the Sinclair scientific calculator that got me through school can deliver more services than the big box that used to sit on my desk a decade ago.

So is my new Nokia ‘really’ a PC, a Walkman, a phone, a PlayStation - or is even asking the question missing the point? Given that different manufacturers are adopting different strategies, I think it is still an issue. The Nokia makes a bid to do everything. When it is launched shortly, Apple’s iPhone will have a touch-screen but no GPS, at least initially. Last week, Palm announced the Foleo, a 10-inch mini-laptop with nearly full size keyboard to be used in conjunction with a smart phone.

Point 4 is that with the mobile revolution has come the need for new components for on-line business models. Unless mobile users actually buy stuff and sustain a whole ecosystem of search marketing, widespread adoption will become stalled. And if it’s really worth me surfing to find music or books or shoes or flights I want to buy, the vendor and I need a mechanism that enables him to charge me securely without either of us being dependent on any particular network or handset or combination of either. One of the few companies I’ve come across active in this space is Bango.

My final point takes me back to mother-in-law research. Worried that I’m too much of a fogey really to ‘get’ the mobile revolution I asked a sample (n = 3) of tech-savvy students what they use. To my surprise, they currently favour having more than one device: a smart phone and a PDA or a PlayStation or a small laptop. The Palm Foleo solution may not appeal to me, but perhaps that’s because in choosing the Nokia N95 I’ve opted for a neat all-in-one hot hatchback whereas there’s still a big market out there for SUVs and even three-car families.

I did warn you it’s difficult to find analogies for the mobile revolution.

1 October 2007

Originally posted on CandidCapital - 7 June 2007

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