Marketing Blogs
|
by Joe Barberon Aug 25 |
Lifestyle Index misses the mark for mobile marketersm
On Friday morning in Sydney I attended the launch of the fourth Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index report compiled as a collaborative project by AIMIA, m.Net Corporation and Ideal Interfaces in April 2008.
You can download and read the full report by clicking on the icon below.
If you’re a marketer interested in mobile, then read on. In this post I’ll not only discuss some of the most interesting findings for marketers from this research, but I’ll also look at why aspects of the research were thoroughly disappointing from a marketer’s perspective.
Here’s a snapshot of the report’s most interesting findings:
- Mobile phone ownership: 49% owned a mobile phone for over seven years.
- Telecommunications provider: Optus (35%) and Telstra (25%) were in the same positions as the last survey and were still the dominant telecommunications providers with the participants of this survey. Vodafone (16%) just took the third spot back from 3 (15%).
- Bill payment: Nearly 85% paid their own mobile phone bill.
- Monthly spend: 70% spent <$60, 19% spent $21–$31, and 14% of respondents spent more than $100 per month on their mobile phone bill.
- Most participants identified voice (84%) and SMS (84%) as key expenditure items on their monthly phone bill, followed by MMS (22%), buying content (9%), and email (7%).
- 73% used their mobile phone mainly or exclusively for personal use.
- Voice and SMS dominate as the key methods of communication across all groups.
- SMS and MMS are most popular as a means of communicating with family and friends.
- 83% of respondents stated that they used at least one of the listed online communities on their PC.
- MMS (63%) and Bluetooth (61%) were the main methods of sharing content.
- 36% of participants stated that they had purchased or subscribed to information services on their mobile phone, while 33% of respondents stated that they purchased mobile content in the last 12 months.
- The top three content types purchased were games (43%), true tones (42%) and wallpapers (33%).
- Although news (53%), weather (50%) and sport (34%) continue to dominate the information accessed over the last 12 months, there has been an increase in the percentage of respondents using almost all types of information. The greatest growth since Survey 3 has occurred in maps (347%), restaurant/café guides and reviews (174%), and TV listings (93%).
- The most popular requests for future mobile information were maps (31%), news (29%) and weather content (28%).
- Again, SMS (62%) was the most desired application for future use, email (49%) came second, and then MMS (42%).
As interesting as many of these individual statistics are, unfortunately the high expectations of finally having some solid Australian research into the way people use mobiles were not met. The labelling of the report as a ‘mobile phone lifestyle index’ would certainly have demanded a more thorough and comprehensive research task than was presented. Read on to find out some of the problems with the research as I see them.
