Mobile Marketing: Bet on the iPhone

I don’t need to tell you the iPhone is the hottest mobile device on the planet. The media has done a per­fectly good job of doc­u­ment­ing that fact. What may be less her­alded is the mag­ni­tude of its impact on your mobile mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives, and the remark­able depth and qual­ity of expe­ri­ence it will offer your mobile site’s visitors.

For those of you who own iPhones, you know that it deliv­ers the almost exact expe­ri­ence of online brows­ing that your lap­top and desk­top com­put­ers do. For those of you who don’t, here’s why: because the iPhone actu­ally uses the same browser as its larger brethren: Safari, and because the iPhone is an actual com­puter vs. a cell phone that is try­ing to emu­late a computer’s web brows­ing abil­i­ties. The only sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence is screen size.

Let’s look at the iPhone’s num­bers regard­ing mar­ket share, mobile browser usage, their trends, and the future they portend.

First, mar­ket share:

As this graph shows, since its launch in June of 2007, the iPhone has gar­nered almost 20% of the smart phone mar­ket. Impres­sive per­for­mance for any elec­tronic device, but espe­cially so for a brand new entrant into the rel­a­tively mature cell­phone market–with high lev­els of installed users who had to pay a sig­nif­i­cant pre­mium to switch to the iPhone. Now let’s exam­ine the dis­pro­por­tion­ate mobile browser usage this 20% represents

.

In sim­plest terms: 20% of all users are con­sum­ing nearly 50% of the mobile brows­ing pie.

Add to this the iPhone’s rate of mar­ket share growth: a nearly 300% increase in less than a year, and the evi­dence of the grow­ing oppor­tu­nity this device rep­re­sents becomes rather persuasive.

So what does this mean to you? What strat­egy and tac­tics should this data inspire?

Here are a few pre­dic­tions and recommendations:

1. Expect +60% of all mobile browser traf­fic to be iPhone cen­tric by the end of Q1 2009.

2. The rumored pay-as-you-go Nano iPhone with a tar­geted price of around $100 which is expected for the 2008 hol­i­day buy­ing sea­son will be very pop­u­lar among youth who were pre­vi­ously unable to afford iPhones, and will extend rich mobile mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ences into this impor­tant demographic.

3. Opti­mize con­cep­tion, design, and devel­op­ment of mobile mar­ket­ing assets for the iPhone: video, games, sites, wid­gets, video/music ring­backs. This will pro­vide the rich­est user expe­ri­ence for the broad­est base of early adopter users who are most likely to evan­ge­lize brands. Sub­se­quently, adapt this con­tent for less sophis­ti­cated mobile devices. We rec­om­mend against (exclu­sive) low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor devel­op­ment when plat­form adop­tion trends so strongly favor the iPhone.

4. Con­tender devices which fea­ture sim­i­lar mobile web brows­ing and smart phone capa­bil­i­ties will enter the mar­ket, and will likely emu­late the fea­tures and tech­nolo­gies that have made the iPhone so suc­cess­ful. This will sim­ply extend reach of iPhone opti­mized, browser ori­ented assets to those devices’ populations.

5. The iPhone’s browser is but one des­ti­na­tion for your mobile mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives. Apple’s App Store may rep­re­sent an equally sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity: offer­ing con­sumers branded appli­ca­tions. Since its intro­duc­tion a month ago, there have already been 60 mil­lion free and paid-for down­loads, gen­er­at­ing $1m a day in sales, and the store could crack the half-billion dol­lar mark within a year of open­ing. As of Thurs­day, August 21 , there were 2,142 appli­ca­tions offi­cially avail­able for the iPhone. The App Store offers a won­der­ful, easy-to-use mass mar­ket con­duit for deliv­er­ing appli­ca­tions to con­sumers, and as of this date, if your appli­ca­tion is free, there is no charge to use this dis­tri­b­u­tion mech­a­nism. (Don’t count on this free­bie last­ing for­ever.) For paid-for appli­ca­tions, Apple offers a 30/70 rev­enue split with developers.

Your thoughts?

Posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 7:10 AM. Filed under: Uncategorized RSS 2.0 feed.

4 Responses to “Mobile Marketing: Bet on the iPhone”

1. iPhone Daily Briefing - 2008.08.21 | raven.me says:

   August 22, 2008 at 2:58 AM

   […] Mobile Mar­ket­ing: Bet on the iPhone, Quo Vadis — Uncom­mon Sense, Rick Julian […]

   Reply
2. Jamie says:

   October 12, 2008 at 7:16 PM

   Are these num­bers for iPhone world­wide or just for the States?

   Reply
3. rjulian says:

   October 13, 2008 at 4:21 PM

   Hello Jamie,

   The num­bers were pulled from http://marketshare.hitslink.com/, and as best I can tell, they are global. They’re also don’t reflect share growth since the release of the 3G model, so I expect they are on the con­ser­v­a­tive side.

   Thanks,
   Rick

   Reply
4. blood program says:

   January 9, 2009 at 2:46 AM

   Yes, the num­bers are impres­sive, iPhone is great!

   Reply