Mobile Youth- mobileYouth 2006 — It’s Social, Stupid
The Wireless World Forum has released its 196-page mobileYouth report for 2006, with the press release trumpeting the statistic that children would spend almost $30,000 on mobile services over their lifetime, although there is a lot of interesting stuff in the report…this is some of it.
The figures (for future lifetime value of UK customers) break down as:
Aged 10 — $27,996
Aged 15 — $27,198
Aged 35 — $13,368
Aged 50 — $5,364
So someone who is 35 has a higher ARPU than a teenager, but has already spent half of what they are going to spend in their lifetime. I guess the lesson here is to get in early with the kids so they keep using your service as they grow older.
At one point the report claims that personified handsets (ie, those that have been named) are easier to market because “emotional branding associated with naming handsets makes a product range more appealing to mobileYouth than would a feature-branded handset”. Rokr’s big secret to success may not have been the features but the fact that it was given a name rather than a product code.
The report decries the frenzied search for the “killer app” or “next big thing”, claiming that “our energies will be inevitably exhausted by chasing trends”. Instead the industry should be asking “What do mobileYouth love?” and “What role does the mobile phone play in the social universe of youth?” to produce better products and marketing (with a corresponding higher chance of success in the marketplace). So for example, mobile TV must “redefine the social, rather than
viewing, experience”. And for mobile music: “Music is a good example of how the opportunity is either overlooked or misread by its stakeholders. Instead of using the mobile channel to enhance existing behavioral patterns associated with music i.e. sharing of opinion, collective shopping with peers, the role of the DJs and artists in informing the public the music industry seeks to maximize revenues through using the medium as a sales channel.”
Another interesting statement: “The quest to fill ‘niche time’ is the preserve of an industry that has yet to fully understand its own potential value.” Basically, the mobile content industry is saying that its product is so crap it can only compete with boredom.
