the hobbyists and specialists—the only people who ever really cared about that stuff anyway.
The then-new Kindle Fire tablet was a prime example of this trend: “By pretty much all accounts, this is a cheaply built device. Spec-wise, it’s pretty ho-hum. But it’s a cheaply built device that comes at a cheap price. That matters more—especially when paired with Amazon.com,” and the retailer’s digital media and shopping options.
—People Don’t Buy Things, They’re Sold Things. Windows Phone general manager-turned entrepreneur Charlie Kindel made this point in a presentation last week at ThinkSpace in Redmond. He expanded the idea in a blog post this week on GeekWire.
The idea is pretty simple: Mass markets in the U.S. are reached by tons of effective marketing. “Even if you go and buy a commodity like cereal, you buy the one that was sold to you on TV, like it or not,” Kindel said.
That’s clearly true in the mobile phone market. Along with being an amazingly capable hardware company and cunning dealmaker, Apple has presided over some of the most iconic advertising campaigns in a generation. Now ask yourself this: What’s the last Nokia commercial you remember seeing?
In the smartphone race, there’s another crucial element to marketing—the retail stores, controlled mostly by the carriers. As Kindel pointed out, controlling the retail counter is the crucial last mile in sales that can make all the difference in the world.
Kindel, who participated in deals with phone manufacturers and carriers during the development of Windows Phone 7, says that point-of-sale push matters more than anything—the developer ecosystem, the quality of the operating system, or the number of apps.
“When you walk into a retail store for Verizon to buy a smartphone, you’re steered towards Android or iPhone. Windows Phone is a third player,” he said.
—The Consumer Reptile Brain. Professional blogger Robert Scoble pointed out this bit of amateur psychology in reply to an earlier post by Kindel about Windows Phone’s marketing problem.
Scoble digs into his past as a retail gadget salesman to unearth a tidbit about mass-market consumer behavior: Most people want to buy the thing they know about, the one that is “safe” to own, because it has the apps they’ve heard about and want, and also won’t make them stand out as a weirdo with the non-standard phone.
“No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t unload crappy products on consumers. They generally are smarter than that,” Scoble wrote. “One thing I learned working the counter at several Silicon Valley consumer electronics stores is that there’s only one thing people really care about when it comes to buying things: Not looking stupid.”
At this point, with some 100,000 apps in its ecosystem, Nokia is probably well into the territory of having just about anything a regular consumer would want in a smartphone. Sure, that’s still a slice of the total apps that iOS or Android can offer. But it’s good enough.
What Windows Phone doesn’t offer is the safety of the herd. People are generally going to fall into two camps when they go into a carrier retail store: People who want and can afford iPhones, and those who think iPhones are either too overhyped or too expensive. In the latter case, there are great, nice-looking Samsung phones running Android that some of their friends probably have. Sold.
Why would anyone take a chance on a Windows Phone in that situation? If a retail guy isn’t pushing it, and if the consumer hasn’t been pounded into submission by a really effective ad campaign, the chances are probably very low.
The new Nokia phones, the Lumia 920 and 820, looked pretty cool from what I could tell on the webcast today. They seem capable of some truly novel things that I can’t do on my iPhone. But if they don’t enter the consumer’s mind as a safe option, if they aren’t sold with brute force, then all the specs in the world won’t matter. They’ll get stuck in that sad death spiral of would-have-been challengers, products that more people would buy if only a bunch of other people would buy them first.
