[Mobile Youth] 5 ways to build a better smartphone experience (without changing the handset)

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5 WAYS TO BUILD A BETTER
SMARTPHONE EXPERIENCE
(WITHOUT CHANGING THE HANDSET)
Prepared by Mobile Youth
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2. !
SMARTPHONE EXPERIENCE: WHY PERCEPTION IS MORE
IMPORTANT THAN THE PHONE
Customer smartphone experience varies by market, even with the same handsets.
How is this possible?
Through the lens of traditional research you may conclude “our customers are
different here” but I want to share with you why that conclusion is a big mistake.
Recommended Reading
Discover mobileYouthʼs Ultimate Guide to Smartphones with links to the latest research
and resources
Teens in France and India aren’t so different their experiences of smartphones
change. People don’t change, but the Soft Factors that shape the smartphone
experience do. If you understand Soft Experience, you understand the smartphone
experience.
Let’s take a look at what defines experience and insights from our latest smartphone
research.
Consider this anomaly: the iPhone may rank with the highest satisfaction in France,
but not in neighboring markets (in the UK, iPhone ranks 2nd whereas in Germany, it
doesn’t even feature in the Top 5) (source The Mobile Youth Report via onDevice).
We need to break down the customer experience and look at its psychology. What
we’ll find is that the perception of the smartphone and how people feel about it is
more important that the physical nature of the smartphone itself.
SOFT VS HARD: OUR PERCEPTION OF THE SMARTPHONE
IS THE EXPERIENCE
So, what shapes customer perceptions of experience? Is it usability, price or form
factor? The answer lies in understanding the difference between Soft and Hard
Smartphone Experience.
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The iPhone doesn’t vary by country, but customer perceptions do and these
perceptions are shaped by marketing, customer service and the Fans.
The same product is perceived in different ways in different markets. This isn’t
because the people are different but because the brand stories, local interpretations
and meanings vary.
Understanding smartphone experience means moving beyond the physical
unchangeables – the nature of the people and the handset – and focusing on what
really determines experience – the soft factors.
Soft Experience: Expectation, brand story, perception, context, social benefit
Hard Experience: Form factor, design, colors, interface, features
Soft experiences change, hard experiences don’t.
Companies focus on the hard factors but these account for only 10% of the
smartphone experience. Hard factors are marginal.
90% of our smartphone experience is shaped by these soft factors and these factors
are a marketing, not a design challenge. The good news is that focusing on the soft
experiences can radically change how customers interact and recommend the
handsets and almost all of this can be done without changing the handset.
So, here are mobileYouth’s 5 tips on how brands can improve the smartphone by
focusing on the Soft Experience.
1. SELL BENEFITS NOT FEATURES
“For each of us, life is a journey. What you want is a device that can help us on the
journey,” Samsung’s CEO JK Shin said during the Samsung Galaxy S4 launch.
Better lens resolution is a feature whereas a better way to share photos with your
friends is a distinct social benefit. Instagram has shown that most people are more
likely to adopt technology based on its social benefit as opposed to technological
prowess.
Feature: Long battery life
Benefit: Keeps you connected 24/7 and won’t let you down when trying to
connect with friends
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If you want to understand why people buy smartphones, understand the interplay of
emotion and logic: People buy on emotion and justify with logic. People buy the
benefits (e.g. “this helps me fit in with my friends”) and tell you they bought it
because of the features (e.g. “it was on special offer”, “it has Carl Zeiss lenses” etc).
Customer Insights need to take the features that the product teams will highlight
and correlate this information with the social needs of the customer. This means
matching features with known social drivers of your customer base. E.g. “This phone
has a great camera lens” becomes “you can create and share better pictures with
your friends”.
For marketing people, don’t go to the agency looking for answers about what your
customers want, they won’t have a clue. Agencies only know how to sell advertising
(and, by the way, if advertising was so good, why don’t ad agencies advertise?)
Marketing needs to be briefing agencies about what your customers want (not vice
versa) The reality is that if you want to create effective marketing, look inside at your
insights team and find out what stories and social benefits you need to brief your
agencies with e.g. “we want to emphasize how this camera helps students connect
with each other through better photos.”
2. FOCUS ON FIXING CUSTOMER PAIN POINTS
“LG is continuously innovating to offer creative ways to offer a user experience that
adds value to our customers,” said Jong-Seok Park, President and CEO of LG
Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “It’s the positive UX that will
differentiate smartphones in 2013 and beyond, not only cutting-edge hardware
specs.”
For most people, the simple things underpin experience. Although we get excited
about form factors and speeds, it’s the less glamorous aspects of smartphones like
battery life and reliability that make or break handset brands.
“Simple can be harder than complex:You have to work hard to get
your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end
because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
Reliability ranked as the #1 factor that influenced product experience (source The
Mobile Youth Report). Battery life and issues with network provider were the two
most common forms of negative experience associated with handsets (source
McKinsey).
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While Apple iPhones are often praised by media for their technology, it’s their
reliability (or perceived reliability) that shapes experience. According to website
FixYa, Apple ranked as the most reliable device (based on share of over 700,000
reported handset issues).
3. BUILD EXPERIENCE AROUND THE EVERYDAY
“Think about your device,” said Google CEO Larry Page. “Battery life is a challenge
for most people.You shouldn’t need to carry around a charger to make it through
the day. If your kid spills their drink on your tablet, the screen shouldn’t die. And
when you drop your phone, it shouldn’t shatter.”
Common things done uncommonly well. While mundane doesn’t sound like a natural
selling point for your smartphones, the everyday experience sells phones. 80% of
smartphone usage is the regular, low-tech tasks like messaging, email or taking
pictures. Most popular smartphone activities are checking email (78%), exchanging
text messages (76%) and taking pictures (74%) (source IDC).
Without these mundane features, the smartphone would be useless to most people.
How your smartphone performs on a daily basis is far more memorable than its
prowess at isolated events (e.g. the typical ad agency “hey look at me in this rock
concert video”).
89% of 18-24 year olds reach for the phone within 15 minutes of waking up. What
other technology can claim this depth of relationship? If the smartphone was
exciting and to some extent, surprising, fewer people would be reaching for it as
their de facto starting point of the day but because it’s reliable, controllable and
contains no surprises we trust its presence.
4. FOCUS ON P2P EDUCATION THROUGH FANS
Educating smartphone customers, especially first time buyers, is key to a good
experience.
Customers turn to traditional sources of information for answers (e.g. call centers)
but their issues may be too specific or easily sourced elsewhere to make call centers
a positive experience. 81% of customers turn to friends to related customer service
experiences (source The Mobile Youth Report via Dimensional Research).
83% of youth bought their handsets based on what their peers said (source The
Mobile Youth report). 68% consulted friends to prior to purchase to advise on
benefits (compared with only 9% for brand advertising) (source McKinsey).
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Peer to peer customer service leads to 50% reduction in cost per case to service
customer issues (source The Mobile Youth Report).
Without Fans, the smartphone experience is a blank slate. It’s Fans who turned SMS
into an unused adjunct to the GSM standard into the world’s default messaging
format. It’s Fans who invited and introduced you to Facebook. Without Fans your
smartphone is just a gray slab of carbon and glass.
Most smartphone features aren’t discovered through the manual or official
communication but through peer modelling which in turn promotes the brand. For
example, “I used this app on my iphone to check the surf conditions today”. Fans
shape the smartphone experience because Fans give meaning to technological
content. Fans find new ways to use the smartphone, turning what were once
features into social benefits.
5. DON’T OVERBAKE THE STORY
Smartphone users, especially Fans, look at your marketing and think “where am I in
this story?” A marketing strategy that offers only a rigid, monolithic view of the
brand story offers potential buyers little space to interpret the brand story for their
own personal narratives.
Soft Experience is a curated not a controlled process. If you want to create a better
experience, you have to allow Fans a greater say in the process. This is Paid vs
Earned Media 101.
The experience of the brand and the smartphone happens all around the brand not
just when you are interacting with the handset. Data shows that people who don’t
have an iPhone are more likely to recommend it than those who own one (source
The Mobile Youth Report). This anomaly seems bizarre but the reality is that
experience doesn’t happen in customer hands but in customer minds.
You need to allow some breathing space for Fans to imprint their own personalities
on it.
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