You know how easy it is to get caught up with media hype – I mean, if the media is anything to go by, every single person in the world has an iPhone, don’t they?
Actually, no they don’t.
The problem with shiny new technologies like the iPhone is that although they get masses of media time, the reality is they are only owned by a small group of people. If you are a marketer, and you are thinking that in order to capture a mobile market you simply have to be developing an iPhone app, you might like spend a bit of time doing some research into how extensive your market is, and whether you will get out of it enough to justify what you will need to put in.
A recent article in NMA suggests that in fact, if you were looking at a 25-34 year old male audience (i.e. disposable income…) you may end up disappointed if you believe the media hype and assume that most of them have an iPhone (or any other shiny new gadget for that matter). The reality is that only about 96,000 men will fall into your iPhone user category. That isn’t a particularly big number. And it seems to belie the amount of media time the iPhone receives.
It is really easy to get caught in by the hype. I constantly teach people that they should be cautious of the latest new things or the most recently launched social media site when they are planning their online marketing strategy. That is not to say they aren’t good or they don’t have the potential to become huge. What I am saying is that when you have limited time and resources, you need to be quite strategic in what you engage in. In laymen’s terms that means you need to choose those sites or products which command the greatest relevant audience, and ignore the rest until such time that they can offer you an equivalent audience.
It is fairly obvious, but the news media is trying to get you to take notice. To do that, they will talk about the most exciting, sensational, shiny new thing as if it was universally owned. You could easily be forgiven for believing that if you don’t have an iPhone, you must be the only person in the entire world. Not so. By all means, if what you want is to reach a maximum of 96,000 people in your target audience (remember, you may only get a 1% conversion rate from those people), then focus your attention on the iPhone. If not, then do your research, watch what is going on outside of the news media as much as inside, and make your decisions based on your own data, not on what they are trying to tell you.
Oh, and no, I don’t have an iPhone in case you were wondering.
Thank you to wookiesnort for the image
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Tags: hype, iPhone, Mobile, shiny thing
