Apple’s well-oiled publicity machine may well have ensured that half the planet knows all about their innovative iPhone, but when it comes to dipping in their pockets and buying the thing, it seems us Brits are distinctly sniffy, with a recent YouGov survey discovering that just one per cent of Britons polled would be buying an iPhone.
Although twenty five per cent of respondents expressed ‘a high likelihood’ of shelling out for an iPhone when they saw the feature list, this promptly fell to just one per cent when they learned that the handset would cost a hefty £269 with a minimum monthly contract of £35.
YouGov’s head of technology and telecoms consulting Marek Vaygelt said: “This research conducted prior to any great marketing spend by Apple and its partners shows that there is demand for a phone of this type but consumers are used to subsidised handsets in the UK, more so than in the USA.”
“The challenge for Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse is to convince customers to make a significantly higher outlay for the iPhone than they have been used to historically,” he added.
Despite Apple’s well-known marketing prowess, only 4 per cent of those surveyed even knew that Apple made a phone, but after some unspecified ‘prompting’ this rose to 39pc -a long long way short of 88pc unprompted market recognition of Nokia (this rose to 98 per cent after a prod).
Clearly, Apple has its work cut out to convince Brits of the iPhone’s value, but a spokesperson from O2 – who have an exclusive contract to sell the phone – was ready to put a gloss on the findings, enthusing that the phone represented ‘great value’, and pointing out that over a third of their contract customers were already paying £35 per month or more.
With the phone enjoying remarkable sales in the US (1.4 million snapped up in the first three months of release) we expect the one per cent figure to rise rapidly once Apple kickstart their awesome publicity machine.
The fact that Stuff Magazine has just declared the iPhone the ‘Coolest Gadget of the Year’ can’t hurt either.
What??? Only 1 percent??? OMG! Let’s see 1% of 50 million = 500,000. Half million people x $400.00 a pop, = a measly Two Hundred Million Dollars ($200,000,000) that apple can expect???
I’m selling my stock. They might as well close up shop now – like Michael Dell said. Apples days are numbered……
I can’t do any thing about what the other guy wants, so 1% or 100% I could care less, however I think that 1% is a questionable stat, even for the Brits. Sounds more like a journalist trying to get hits for a ho-hum story.
The figures comes from a YouGov survey of more than a thousand people and not an individual journalist as you are suggesting.
YouGov is a British internet-based market research firm and a member of the British Polling Council.
http://www.yougov.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/10/24/bcniphone124.xml
Well it’s obviously too expensive.
You know, Apple is obviously very skilled at building a very good cell phone that everyone wants.
However Apple is very very bad at building a marketing strategy where those people who want the phone can actually get one.
Nokia sells phones that have 3rd party app support, you can use them on any network and show up as a hard drive when you plug them in.
They also have money coming in by the truckloads.
Whereas Apple has a very interesting product, yet six months after it came out they are still selling it in only one country. That’s crazy, when with a different strategy they could be saturating the world market with these devices.
Most of the phones in the US are also heavily subsidized (most phones are often free with phone services); however, the iphone managed to get people to shell out $600 per phone when it launched in July. And sold 1.4 phones in 3 months.
@minty – US, yes but the UK lead the way on phone subsidies – and the operators have learnt to regret having done so, as people now expect free phones.
The all encompassing hype that Apple built with iPhone gives operators an opportunity to shift away from expecting free.
Personally I don’t think there’s enough about the iPhone to get excited about