Beware the Ides of March said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar before he was brutally murdered by his customers. With the launch of the Galaxy S IV, the same could have been said for Samsung. The fanfare around the launch was new for Samsung, seeking to gather as many eyeballs as Apple does for their cryptic events. While tech pundits complained about the mash-up betweenMad Men and Leave it to Beaver (rightfully so it seems), Argus Insights was busy understanding how the big S compared to the big A with their Big Apple (pardon the pun) event.
When we compared the hourly social mention volume between the iPhone 5 launch in September 2012 and the March 14, 2013 launch of the Samsung Galaxy S IV, there is no comparison. The iPhone 5 event attracted almost 10X the buzz of Samsung. Samsung did beat out RIM’s BB10 launch in January by a fair margin, almost 2X.
So little surprise that Samsung wasn’t able to compete with the iPhone 5 launch. The silver lining is that Samsung didn’t have the post launch fall off that Apple or RIM did.
When we normalize for the days prior the launch, though Samsung comes in third place, meaning that both Apple and RIM had bigger lifts in social media in comparison. While the RIM overall volume may have been the lowest, it was a big event for them, pushing proportionally more awareness than the Samsung event.
How will this translate to sales of the Galaxy S IV? Reach out to Argus Insights to find out. We’ll be releasing our new Smartphone and Tablet Demand Side Forecast in the middle of Q2. Email if you’d like a free copy of the inaugural issue, sales@argusinsights.com.
What is it that people think and then talk about? In this highly connected world in which we now live in this question is vitally important. Why do consumer packaged goods brands like Coke and Pepsi continue to spend millions of dollars on advertising every year? Surely, at this point there are very few people who do not consume one of these products relatively frequently let alone have little to no knowledge of the brand at all. The same can almost be said for those durable goods companies such as Ford, Apple, and BestBuy. These companies enjoy a great amount of brand penetration into the market, but the purchase cycle for these products is very long and yet they also spend millions on advertising. The answer to this question is mindshare. When a consumer goes into a store to buy a product, companies not only want their products to be recognized when they are seen, they want it to be in that consumers’ mind before even walking into the store. If a customer is thinking about your product before they even look at the options, they will be more inclined to purchase the item.
The second important part of brand awareness is mouthshare, or how much a customer talks about a topic, or in this case, a brand. The amount of time a customer discusses about a subject is related to how much they think about said topic and how important it is to them on an aggregate level. Thus the more a customer talks about a brand, the greater the chance they interact with that product and the greater its importance. In addition, talking about a brand serves to enhance brand awareness in other individuals thus furthering the cycle. 1) Coca ColaOver the past couple weeks Argus Insights has delved into what drives mouthshare, or people’s conversational topics. For this study, we chose Twitter due to the greater volume of data available compared to other social media outlets. We looked at the related Twitter feeds for twenty-six companies and name brands over a two-week period ranging from Subway and Coca-Cola to Tide, Urban Outfitters, Ford, and Apple. In general, the majority of discussed brands will fall into one of two main categories: 1) common interactions, such food and drink; and 2) major purchases, such as electronics and automobiles. It should not be much of a surprise then that the top five mentioned brands were:
1) Coca-Cola
2) Apple
3) Nokia
4) Ford
5) Subway
These top brands also all had approximately 10% share of our total tweets for the examined time with Coke obtaining an impressive 95,537 tweets.
If we look at these brands, we instantly see that the most talked about brands also share product passion and market permeation. Many people have strong feelings about these brands and everyone knows and uses them. Now lets look at the last five brands:
22) Charles Schwab
23) Famous Footwear
24) Imation
25) Cabella’s
26) Heinz Ketchup
We can see that two of the five are clothing companies. While the brand of your clothing may be very important to a teenage girl, or some incredibly clothes conscious males, to a majority it is of primary importance that the clothes fit and look good. Even when the brand matters for their purchase decisions, it will infrequently makes its way into casual conversation. One is a tech company that, while it may be a global player in the industry, does not have a great amount of mindshare for the average person.
All of this chatter is relatively small however compared to the fire hose that is Twitter with its average 250 million tweets a day. All of these brands together make up 0.049% of the tweets for the week period. Though while the percentage of the total stream is small,there can be an enormous impact on a given company. A single positive or negative tweet can be picked up by another person and retweeted hundreds if not thousands of times within minutes, which depending on the message can have a real fiscal impact on a company.
Now let’s examine these same ideas in a more concrete dollars and cents way. First let’s take several representative companies from consumer packaged goods, durable goods, and clothing comparing the projected revenues for the analyzed time period per tweet we get some interesting results. For each section we are looking at popular and well-known brands:
Consumer packaged goods are consumed on a regular basis and their message is constantly advertised giving them a high revenue to tweet ratio. On the other end durable goods like those purchased at BestBuy while not a frequent purchase, elicit high consumer passion resulting in nearly twice as high of a revenue to tweet ratio. In the middle there is almost a dead-zone of consumer engagement with the clothing sector. Even these three well know and popular brands have a paltry revenue to tweet ratio of less than $400 each.
With the proper understanding, the social media sphere can be a useful tool to promote and monitor a company’s mouthshare. A company that uses this knowledge can help to direct the fire hose of social media and not simply be washed away by it.
RIM had their annual meeting earlier this week. Notably missing from the shareholder outcry was the push to sell or split off salable assets to interested parties. We all know that since the launch of the iPhone, RIM has been spiraling down in terms of both market share and customer satisfaction. The biggest question that the board and newish CEO should be asking if they can pull out of the dive in time before scattering push servers, patent plaques and unsold Storms all over the Canadian countryside. Of course we have an opinion on this. Actually we’ve just aggregated the user opinion on this. You can see the Blackberry fall from grace played out over this snapshot of the Smartphone market. Only LG has fallen faster from grace. These results are based on user opinions gathered from all RIM phones launched in the past few years.
Notice where Apple and Blackberry trade places in the minds of consumers. It was when the iPhone became available on Verizon so now the legions of RIM faithful in NYC and other major metro areas could finally embrace the iPhone experience and make phone calls, unlike their locked in AT&T brethren. Every attempt to refresh the product lines led to further decay while Apple continues to flourish.
But what is RIM to do? Is there enough residual Social Capital in RIM customer experience to recover with Blackberry 10, which has been delayed again? We’ll answer that question in our next post but you can always reach out if you’d like to know sooner!
least until Best Buy sent out their “please review your recent purchase emails” to what appears to be a cohort of passionate iPad owners all posting glowing reviews on 18 April) but the buzz levels for the new iPad were low, especially compared to the still available, but now cheaper, iPad 2. Delight and Buzz both began to recover in April but not soon enough to shift our thinking regarding the earnings call this past Tuesday.
Consumer responses to product experiences, as measured using our CIA platform, continue to be leading indicators of sales trends. We also anticipated the surprising increase in iPad 2 sales at the end of Summer 2011. I’m sure all those iPad 3 case and accessory manufacturers would have appreciated some advanced warning before ramping additional inventory…
If you want our help getting the jump on uncertainty in your market, please contact Argus Insights today, sales@argusinsights.com or +1-877-992-7487.
You know we’ve been sharing that the new iPad has proved to be a more compelling reason for consumers to buy an iPad 2 than the new iPad. Then the improbable happened. The iPad 3 recovered. It did more than recover, it jumped to the top of the charts. It’s like the whole family answered the call to review Aunt Bertha’s steamy romance model on Amazon when sales were flagging. Check out the graph below to see what we’re talking about.
What happened? Was this the result of post Tax Day ex
uberance? “Now that I’m getting a tax refund, I’m buying a new iPad!” The new iPad jumped ahead of the iPad 2 after a rapid decline in delight, something unheard of for an Apple product. In fact, the new iPad is considered to be the most delightful tablet on the market today, barring any new releases in the coming weeks as you can see in the sparklines below.
If you want to know why this drastic shift took place, give us a shout at Argus Insights. We’ll be releasing a report on all the sordid details of the new iPad’s market response in the coming weeks that will include our own forecast as to the future success of the new iPad.