Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip
Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip
These days, designing a new mobile phone can seem like something out of an episode of “Dr. Phil.”
LG Electronics, the maker of the Chocolate and Voyager phones,
begins by asking focus groups to keep a journal, jotting down feelings
about features they like most. Participants can call a toll-free number
to share their emotions about the phone they are testing. And sometimes
they are asked to draw pictures that represent their mood when they
hold the phone.
“Our job is to be behaviorists and psychologists,” said Ehtisham
Rabbani, LG’s vice president for product strategy and marketing. “We
constantly have to be reminding ourselves that we tend to be geek types
and our customers are not.”
Executives and industry analysts say it has become more important
than ever to understand the psyche of consumers and why they pick one
phone over another. That’s because LG, Motorola, Nokia and others are in a fierce battle to please finicky customers as new entrants like Apple, with its popular iPhone, seek to upend the traditional mobile phone business.
At stake are millions of dollars in profits and the fortunes of
entire companies. Like fashion or entertainment, the cellphone industry
is increasingly hit-driven, and new models that do not fly off the
shelves within weeks of their debut are considered duds. The most
gadget-conscious shoppers buy new phones every nine months, twice as
fast as they did a few years ago. And teenagers, one of the
fastest-growing markets, are especially quick to dump a brand if it
loses popular appeal.
“The world has changed,” said Jeremy Dale, who is in charge of
marketing for mobile devices at Motorola, where fortunes tumbled with
the decline of its once popular Razr. “There is more relevance in what
other consumers say than what the company is saying.”
Cellphone company executives are so concerned about these trends
that, at the largest mobile phone trade show in Barcelona this month,
panelists debated how their industry could better understand how to
make customers happy, as Apple seems to do. One panelist suggested that
cellphone makers tap into consumers’ “neural networks”, while another
said they should understand their subliminal needs.
The speed of innovation — or rather, consumers’ appetite for it —
makes it harder for companies to compete. Ten years ago, wireless
carriers and mobile phone makers could thrive by offering consumers two
or three new options a year. But now, with nearly 80 percent of
Americans owning a mobile phone and hundreds of models available, a
company’s fate can turn as quickly as a teenage girl’s temperament.
Mr. Dale says companies like his are forced to give consumers what
they want even before they know they want it. Motorola was a market
leader in late 2004 when it introduced the ultraslim Razr. But when the
company failed to create a worthy successor, its stock plummeted and
investors revolted.
Motorola’s share of handset sales in the United States dropped to 30
percent by the fourth quarter of 2007, from 35 percent in the first
quarter, according to the NPD Group, which tracks sales. Now Motorola
is considering a breakup of the company.
Different companies, of course, take different approaches to
understanding consumer tastes. Along with extensive focus-group
testing, LG executives regularly attend home and design shows looking
for broader trends in popular culture.
Mr. Rabbani said that last year he and his colleagues noticed that
natural materials like wood, metal and leather were popular among
furniture and appliance makers. So when designing the Venus, which LG
introduced in late 2007, designers molded the plastic back to give it
the texture of grainy leather. Verizon and LG declined to give sales figures for the phone.
But whatever the cultural inspiration, if a new phone does not catch
on quickly, it is not likely to catch on at all. Even interesting
designs do not necessarily spell success. Helio, a joint venture of EarthLink
and SK Telecom of South Korea that developed the Ocean and other phones
for the youth market, is reported to be looking for a buyer for its
business, too.
“The strongest marketing tool is the first 20,000 people who buy the
device,” Mr. Dale of Motorola said. “If they like it, they will tell
their friends.”
The focus on the consumer mindset can be intense. Three weeks ago, a
small team of Nokia executives had their first gathering at a farmhouse
30 miles north of Santa Barbara, Calif., for a three-day retreat to
discuss consumer behavior.
The group is the first of its kind at Nokia, the world’s No. 1
seller of mobile phones, bringing together 14 designers and researchers
from California and Helsinki, where the company is headquartered. Their
charge is to tell Nokia’s top executives not only what consumers will
want next year, but 3 to 15 years from now.
“We have the ability to clarify the needs of real people,” said Rhys Newman, who heads the team.
A case in point: A few years ago one of Nokia’s designers visited
China and noticed that people there used the light from their mobile
phone screens to illuminate dark hallways so they could more easily
unlock their doors. After he discussed his observation with other Nokia
designers, Nokia added a penlight to some models.
“Design used to be inconsequential: just make it pretty, make it
sell,” said Mr. Newman, who, along with three members of his team, was
interviewed at Nokia’s design center near a strip mall in downtown
Calabasas, south of Los Angeles. Now, he said, “we have to think about
human fundamentals.”
Two and a half years ago, Nokia executives asked Mr. Newman and some
colleagues to explore what Nokia’s strategy should be as consumers
began to personalize their cellphones. Among those working on the
project were Jan Chipchase, a human behavior researcher for Nokia who
lives in Tokyo and travels the world studying culture and
communication, and Andrew Gartrell, a 14-year veteran designer.
On a trip to Ghana last year, a colleague of Mr. Chipchase took a
photograph of the crushed front panel of a Nokia 1100 mobile phone that
had been discarded in the middle of a dusty road.
Mr. Gartrell, who had helped design the 1100, was unnerved by the
image; the phone had just come out in 2003. Mr. Newman said Nokia’s
designers and researchers became fixated on the notion that the company
makes 16 mobile phones a second and that many of them end up in the
garbage heap.
So instead of examining the personalization of phones, Mr. Newman
and his fellow designers suggested that Nokia explore how to make more
environmentally sound products — or, as Mr. Gartrell put it, “How do we
turn waste into something beautiful?”
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