We have read an interesting summary of an analysis made on smartphone users’ loyalty to the brand of their current handset.
The conclusions driven there seem reasonable, though we believe one should be cautious when drawing conclusions.
We think the smartphone market, booming these days, might change a lot in short time, so many things are still developing and reaching users as we write this, that today’s conclusions may be completely different in a few months from now.
If loyalty is a reflection of satisfaction, we’d still need to define how satisfaction is measured. We still need to be clear about what it really means to the user. It is not the same thing a professional that has been given a Blackberry by his employer, for example, to use it for professional email and SMS than a university student that basically might want his phone for chatting, web browsing and facebook logging.
To measure satisfaction, one would need to know the cost a given product has meant to the user, and the expectations he really had about what he got. If we were given a smartphone for the first time for free by an employer of ours, which allowed us to do email on-the-go (assumed our previous phone did not allow us to), we would be very happy with that, regardless the OS (Android, IOS4 or Symbian, for example), especially if it is our company that pays the bill. We would not be more loyal to the handset brand than however loyal our employer were.
As well, if we were to use a Windows Mobile phone after having had an iPhone or Android, our satisfaction/loyalty would be seriously reduced…
As well, there are many factors that can influence user satisfaction or loyalty which might not depend on the handset you are using, nor the OS it supports. What about the carrier service, possibilities or limitations? What about its service plan, the cost of it? For some customer segments, it might be as well important the brand perception or how “cool” might a given device look or feel. We know of many cases where teenagers ask mom and dad for a Blackberry just because mom or dad use one, or just because the most popular mates at school have one each, for whatever reason.
Hard to measure loyalty or user satisfaction, and hard to extrapolate results for predicting future volumes or sales.
We see the current smartphone market more like the case of the youngster that recently got his car driver’s license for the first time. The prospect of moving from being a bike user to driving a car on his own is so exciting to him that he will be the happiest person in the world to have his car, no matter if it is a brand new convertible Ferrari sportscar, or mom’s 20-year old Volkswagen, that she recently replaced by a new one. At the end of the day, both cars open for the kid a new world of possibilities, one way or another, that were so far inaccessible to him.
In a market so much subject to change in very short time frames, conclusions from this kind of surveys should then need to be very carefully managed and understood, we think, making sure one 
compares “apples to apples” to make those conclusions really valid or useful. By the way, those who prefer Blackberry might prefer to compare “berries to berries”…
Good post! I fully agree with the observations.
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