Remember the “soccer mom”? First, she was avidly courted as a voter, later as a consumer.
If you believe the handset marketers — admittedly, a leap of faith — the soccer mom even helped create a new breed of enterprise devices. Because devices are only created to meet the consumer’s demand, right?
You’ll recall that the soccer mom was seized upon, though not universally, as smartphone vendors began to seek wider markets for their wares outside the actual enterprise, a pattern that continues today — though the soccer mom herself has receded into marketing history.
Finding a market
Let’s take a look at how that linkage developed and why it remains a useful marketing paradigm.
The realization among device marketers that running a home and raising a family presented scheduling, multi-tasking and communications challenges akin to running an small-/mid-sized business suddenly made the soccer mom a target for enterprise-friendly devices in 2006. The “soccer mom” merely provided a warm, fuzzy face for part of the demographic niche dubbed the prosumer. (Remember the gender-neutral “prosumer”? Still with us.)
One subtext to the soccer mom narrative of two years ago could well be that handset marketers are clueless Neanderthal males who only recognized the soccer mom in order to exploit her purchasing potential. Closer to the truth: handset marketers merely seized the demographic tag-du-jour, stealing from their political counterparts, for their own purposes.
But, coupled with aggressive pricing, this demographic-identity strategy ushered in the current line of stylish, affordable smartphones equipped with QWERTY keypads that could straddle the prosumer and enterprise markets. Once smartphones and advanced feature phones got traction with stylish looks and pricing in the $100 to $150 range, they were further differentiated and the soccer mom was no longer needed.
Q answered the question
One case in point: the introduction of Motorola Inc.’s Q in the spring of 2006 at Verizon Wireless at about $200.
As recently as two years ago, actual enterprise-grade devices were too expensive — $300 and up — and too chunky to attract a mainstream audience, not to mention the proverbial “sweet spot” where two markets overlap. So, nearly two years ago, device vendors brought to market enterprise devices in slimmer form factors at affordable prices, while murmuring about the “soccer mom,” who began to buy smartphones that could serve those interested in entertainment and personal productivity, while remaining useful to the enterprise.
Motorola marketers worked the dual demographic angle, suggesting that soccer moms and enterprise workers would both find the device useful. The Q was, at the time, slim and stylish and feature-packed.
iSuppli analyst Andrew Rassweiler said at that time that given the new price point and Motorola’s dominant share in the United States, “this phone likely will succeed in reducing the pricing for smartphones overall, boosting acceptance among users who might flinch at the higher-than-$200 price point established by previous PDA/smartphones.”Carrier-driven subsidies, of course, helped with uptake, partly in the hope that the soccer mom would be using revenue-generating services. Voice and e-mail turned out to be the most used features, just as in the enterprise.
Flattery
Naturally, the Moto Q was soon joined by Nokia Corp.’s E62 at Cingular Wireless L.L.C. (remember Cingular?) at $150. Research In Motion Ltd. launched the Pearl that fall at T-Mobile USA Inc., adding a camera and multimedia playback — in a sense, validating the new market segment by sexing-up the vendor’s traditional productivity approach. (Soccer moms could rock out in style and whup some ass at the same time.) By the fourth quarter of 2006, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s BlackJack entered the market at Cingular at $200, as the Q and the E62 plummeted to $100. Game on!
Once the female demographic had been enticed, of course, the soccer mom had served her purpose and receded into history. (Using the demographic tag-du-jour has a limited shelf life.) By 2007, lifestyle/productivity devices were ubiquitous and prices had achieved broad consumer acceptance. Today market analysts merely predict various ramps that have multimedia-slash-productivity devices completing their takeover of the market.
RIM delivered its Curve, HTC Corp. offered the Touch and Tilt and, finally, Palm Inc. — the Mark Twain of the cellular industry (“news of my death has been greatly exaggerated”) — delivered for the fashion-conscious prosumer/enterprise worker with its Centro device at $99.
(In an interesting side note to the phenomenon described here, Moto’s Q 9m refresher at Verizon Wireless at $250 had been recast as a music-centric phone for youthful subscribers, who had been using QWERTY-equipped devices to send text-messages almost to the exclusion of talking.)
Forecasts for UMPCs
The easy prediction: look for the use of a brand-new consumer demographic icon to identify the market for the new class of enterprise devices known as ultra-mobile personal computers. All the conditions are right for a perfect marketing storm: enterprise device vendors are focusing on products that do more than smartphones, but weigh and cost less than laptops. Keypad-sized QWERTYs are one thing, but real productivity will take place on something larger. It may well be that the proverbial, gender-neutral “road warrior” will be resurrected for the task at hand. But I’m holding out for something catchier.
We await the next demographic icon who will, no doubt, be cited as absolutely demanding the next wave of enterprise devices. That looks to be a multimedia-consuming, multi-tasking male with significant income — a mix of the early adopter profile with high data-consumption habits and cash to burn on ultra-mobile PCs.
Like the saga of the soccer mom and the smartphone, UMPCs will come down in price, then slowly infiltrate the prosumer/enterprise ranks. But not without a consumer-oriented demographic tag-du-jour.
Could young, green, affluent and tech-savvy political campaign workers fit the bill? Imagine McCain-iacs and Billary-ites being used to sell UMPCS. Or perish the thought.
