How Android Phone Makers Are Missing the Marketing Boat

An anonymous reader writes "Why are Android device commercials showing giant robots and lightning bolts and not advertising features? Here is an interesting blog post of things Android device manufacturers could be doing to get ahead of Apple, but aren't." On a similar front, as a mostly happy Android user, I must admit envy for the jillions of accessories marketed for the iPhone, especially ones that take advantage of that Apple-only accessory port; maybe the Android Open Accessory project will help.

Comments

Marketing and user experience

[nepka]

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience. You can see it with Linux. Even if the Android advertisements would include features, I have a strong feeling it would be something like "Freedom! 1 GHz processor! 128MB RAM!", ie. just listing specs. That isn't interesting. Users don't know what and why. They don't need to know the specs. In this day and age everyone has lots of things to do, and contrary to popular Slashdot belief, normal people have no need to learn such things. Hell, there's many things I could learn and which would improve my daily life, but I rather learn more about things that really matter and interest to me - that being computers and everything related. At the same time I can see everyone is the same way, but about other things. I don't expect them to know computers or what I know, and they don't expect me to know everything either. Then you can just laught it off. That's being social, something nerds are really bad with.

What most nerds don't get about advertising and user experience is WHY. What can this do to me and why? "What do I get out of the freedom of Android (or Linux)?" It needs to be something that the user, the normal user, actually cares about. As a side note, I honestly can't think of any reason the freedom of Linux would provide to casual users, compared to Windows and OSX. That is probably the reason why Linux still isn't on desktop. It's also what Stallman constantly forgets to mention and just comes out as an asshole trying to force everyone to FOSS.

The iPhone ad shown in the article is actually perfect. It answers why, it shows what you can do and it doesn't go on and on about things users don't directly care about, like processor speed. Hell, I'm a geek and that ad made me want to buy iPhone (and on top of that iPad too!). The Android advertisement just left me thinking if it's an advertisement for some movie or wtf.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[tthomas48]

No it's because iPhones are marketed like wine. The people who buy them are going to love them at least somewhat based upon owning something of "quality". Something that's exclusive. Something that's better than what you have, because it is. And much like wine, you're never going to convince them that Android has all the same features. Because they have a price differential to prove otherwise.
Granted at one point the iPhone was far ahead. But it has long since become about the cachet of being able to afford the device and data plan. My wife voice tweets on her $120 unsubsidized android phone with an unlimited data plan for $35/month. Yet somehow that's not as impressive as a device with Siri and a $199 subsidized phone and a $90/month plan.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[goombah99]

Even if the Android advertisements would include features, I have a strong feeling it would be something like "Freedom! 1 GHz processor! 128MB RAM!", ie. just listing specs. That isn't interesting. Users don't know what and why.

OK. Then if you were a manufacturer that made phones with say, 32 GB (let's assume that's double the maximum everything else), market it?

I dunno, but I'll ask Siri.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because Android users don't have contracts or subsidized phone. Get real. The vast majority of Android users are paying the same price for voice and data as their Apple and Blackberry loving counterparts. The vast majority of Android users are also using a subsidized phones and, yes, many of the leading Android phones are going for prices that are in line with their iPhone cousins.
 
So you're dead wrong. While some Android device might be able to be got for a lower price point and while you may be able to get them with a cheaper data plan, the vast majority of Android users simply aren't doing this.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, most of the big name android devices cost the same as the newest iphone, with service plans that cost the same.

Thing is, you can attack the problem from a price perspective or you can try to go head-to-head against apple in their own court. You can't really do both.

Porsche and VW have been down this road. You have to keep things very separate or one messes up the other. To some people an Android phone is that dogshit $100 phone that looks and works terribly. To others its the insanely crazy (and iphone-expensive) galaxy. Selling the two next to each is bad news... but that's how it goes with an OS deployed over a gajillion devices.

I see us heading to a bazaar situation in mobile some day. A real one. And then apple is going to get kicked out on their ass again, just like they did in the PC market when commoditized home computers yanked the market out from under them.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[demonlapin]

Siri is a lot more impressive than Android's voice functionality, which is basically just voice-to-text with the ability to say "call X", "send text to X", or "navigate to X" tacked on. iCloud is similarly impressive.

Yes, I can do almost all of those things with Android, using Dropbox and Flickr and Amazon, but with Apple you can just turn on iCloud and you're done. No setup required. If saving $60/mo is a really important thing to you, then you're not Apple's target market. They sell to people who have plenty of money and don't want to have to think about their technology. And the iPhone 4S, despite lacking 4G, is in most ways the best phone on the market. When you get down to it, now that Apple stole the notification bar, the primary reason I still use Android is Swype.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[gstrickler]

Market what you can do with that extra storage, not that is has extra storage. "7500 songs or 20 hours of movies". Market benefits, not specs.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[rolfwind]

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.

Hit the nail on the head. There was a huge contingent here jeering and predicting in dire tones the huge failure of the iPad between its unveiling and release. Some nerds gets filled with nerdrage when tech isn't marketed to them, I guess. They also go about trying to sell products in all the wrong fashion and don't understand what drives people to buy them, and end up calling said (and popular) products crap in some hipster-nerd type of elitism which doesn't exactly bring them closer to understanding the market.

Anyway, from what I read, Apple's users more willingly pay for apps, so developers develop more willingly for iPhone. Since the price difference on iPhone and Android products are miniscule when subsidized, it's going to become a "It's the Apps stupid!" cycle ala Apple vs PC wars, except Apple is going to be on the flip side despite having a smaller base. (Also, less fragmentation of devices is nice for the developer as well, but $$$ is king of course.)

Though I wish Web OS became more popular, iOS and its clone Android has UI quirks that annoy me.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[bberens]

The average user won't carry around a USB stick.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[danomac]

The morning of the iPhone 4S the news crew was out downtown talking to a new owner who waited all night for one. He was like "this Siri thing is cool" and asked the phone for the local weather, and it gave him the current time... on camera. That was pretty funny.

I've experienced the same thing with the voice control on my Galaxy S, so I stopped using it. It took longer to get it to do what I wanted with voice than to just type it in.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[quacking duck]

About 63 kB per Siri query.

In other words, I could use Siri 6 or 7 times, and still consume less "bandwidth" (data) than loading the mobile version of Slashdot's front page (418 kB when I checked just now).

Re:Marketing and user experience

[ZackSchil]

Oh my god. No one cares about that bullshit! You just estimate a song at 3:30 and say 256kbps and multiply it out! Your mother is not going to flip through her music collection and sue the phone maker because she only got 3/4ths the number of songs promised. And most likely, if someone has that much music or that unusual of a collection, they'll figure out ahead of time if it will fit!

Re:Marketing and user experience

[nine-times]

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.

I think the "not understanding user experience" is a big problem in the tech industry, and Apple seems to be the only company paying attention to the user experience. Nerds/engineers simply fail to understand; the whole thing goes over their heads.

I've had lots of conversations with nerds/engineers about this, and when I try to talk about how Apple focuses on "user experience", they insist that Apple just makes "prettier" interfaces. To a lot of the people involved in these things, there's a false dichotomy that research and development is either focused on "useful features" or "useless superficial things, like pretty interfaces". They don't understand that there can be such a thing as "too many features", making the user experience confusing and frustrating. They don't seem to understand that it matters how you organize programs, options, and settings in your UI, that it only matters whether the features are there, and not how you access them.

The reason usability is so important is that "features" are only useful if people can figure out what those features are and how to use them effectively. UI design is important, not just to make things pretty, but to give visual cues about how to use the Interface, and to provide intuitive organization. The fact is, smartphones and computers are about as powerful as they need to be to do the things we want to do, and improving usability is probably the most important challenge right now. That is, making it easier to do the things you want to do, and removing the obstacles that prevent you from being productive.

I'm of the opinion that iCloud may end up being one of the great underestimated advancements in computing of the past couple years-- comprehensive data syncing between an entire ecosystem of Internet-connected devices. However, it requires a sort of vertical integration that only Apple is positioned to achieve. In short, I'm probably going to be stuck being an Apple customer for the foreseeable future because Apple is the only consumer electronics company that hasn't stalled out in terms of developing more usable products.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[obarthelemy]

You wouldn't. Look at what Apple does: they hype Facetime, then Siri, and then when you go to buy that, you have to choose between the economy (16 GB), Regular (32 GB) or Deluxe (64GB) model. Flash or RAM size is not a deciding factor: most people don't really know what it does, everybody has the same, and most have SD card anyway, or had rather not say they don't.

Flash / RAM size is not a key feature. Apps and style are.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[demonlapin]

Realized I should respond to both parts of your comment. My experience with Siri is that it's at least as good as Google's voice-to-text was a year ago, and that it's a lot more capable - the voice-to-text part of Siri isn't the part that's interesting, it's that it has natural language processing and can interact with your data much more capably than Android's Voice Actions.

Re:Marketing and user experience

[Sancho]

Apple design is great until someone actually points out an Apple failure. Then the fanboys will try to talk around the issue, marginalize the problem, and marginalize those that are capable of seeing the problem.

I haven't found a perfect phone, computer, or operating system. Every one has its warts. I choose to use the ones which annoy me the least. These tend to be Apple products for things I directly interact with, and Linux (typically Ubuntu) or FreeBSD for things I don't directly touch.

Are there problems with Apple products? Absolutely. There are also problems with Windows and Linux. So I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.

A shiny veneer is great, but some of us just want to get stuff done. Apple's designs aren't all they are hyped to be in this regard.

See, I guess I don't see that.

With (most) Apple products, I find that I spend less time trying to get my computer to work in a way that I can get stuff done, and more time getting stuff done.

Phone devices are a relatively cheap way to find this out for yourself. Hopefully Apple won't manage to litigate competitors out of the market.

Agreed. Without Android, Apple would likely still have a shitty notifications system. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to steal the best UI feature of Android. They might have come up with something as good. I doubt they would do better.

Competition is good, and the patent wars are patently absurd.

I went from a Windows Mobile phone to an iPhone, to and Android. Then I went back to iPhone. There are things about the Android that I loved--the reflowing text when you tap-to-zoom is fantastic. Far and away better than Apple, who only zooms to the DIV element (which might be too large to read, requiring pinch-zooming and then scrolling.) Though I never needed to use it, I like the ability to install third-party software (which isn't available on every Android device, by the way.) And Google had the cloud down long before Apple. The notifications were better than Apple's pre-iOS5. Both of these last two points are now addressed on the iPhone. I also loved that I could view an app manifest in order to know what kinds of things an app was going to have permissions to do, though this wasn't always completely helpful (full internet access was required to view ads--a fairly big permission to do a very common task.)

But ultimately, I felt like I was fighting my Android phone constantly. Scrolling was terrible--I would move my finger across the screen, and about a second later the view would scroll. Apps running in the background slowed my phone down constantly and drained the battery--I had to wipe the phone and install apps one by one until I found which one was doing it (the battery usage screen wasn't showing any third-party app as using a lot of battery.) People could never understand me on the phone--a problem I didn't have before or since (a different Android phone might have fixed that, but it's hard to shop for that particular feature and I don't want to have to return phones until I find one that is usable as a phone.) The mail client (not the Gmail client) was awful. Like something out of the iPhone's first release. I had far more problems with the market, which seemed to auto-update itself and often didn't show me accurate information. And don't get me started on updates. I was running a vulnerable version of the OS for quite some time before I finally rooted and used Cyanogen--more fighting with the phone. Updates to Cyanogen never worked right. Even when I managed to get the update installed, it often utterly killed my performance unless I wiped and reinstalled. Then I had to set a bunch of stuff back up--only some things would be restored from the cloud.

When looking for new phones recently, I realized that there's no coherence for Android devices. Every one is vastly different. On the one hand, this provides more choice. On the other, it's quite overwhelming

Android is not one man's vision. It is more/less.

[wombatmobile]

Why?

Because:

1. Android, unlike iOS, has marketing funded by many different organizations and managers separately, working competitively against other Android manufacturers. They are each trying to differentiate from the other.

2. And don't forget:

3. Android devices don't have a standardized dock/interface connector so dock accessories don't exist for Android.
4. Android devices just show up as dumb disk drives when you plug them into my computer.

Another problem

[Daetrin]

That ad for what you can do with the iPhone was actually an ad for what you can do with iOS. That works fine for Apple because if they convince you to use iOS the only product you're going to buy is an iPhone.

On the other hand if Motorola puts out an ad highlighting all the things you can do with Android then even if they convince you to get an Android phone there's no guarantee you'll by _their_ Android phone.

This isn't an insurmountable problem, they could split the time between what's good about Android and what's good about their phone, or talk about features of Android without mentioning they're features that _all_ Android phones have. But it probably seems safer to the executives to only focus on what's cool about _their_ phone.

And of course the other thing is that i believe historically commercials that have gone with the whiz-bang appeal have done better than commercials that tried to be informative. As a nerd this always bothered me because i'm more interested in facts than presentation. (Not that i don't enjoy a well done presentation, but i try not to let my purchasing habits be influenced by it.) But i guess the majority of the male 18-35 demographic that commercials always try to aim at doesn't think the same way.

So another question to ask is, what demographic is the Apple commercial appealing to? And is it actually more successful overall than the Android commercials? The iPhone is certainly selling well above any individual Android model, but it's selling well below the total Android ecosystem. If one company switched to similar informative commercials would they actually see an increase in sales? Or is the iPhone's dominance as a single model due to some other factor? Again, as i nerd i actually like the tack the Apple commercial is taking (even if i get offended at all the times they imply, or even state outright, that you can't do the same thing on Android when you most certainly can) but historically appealing to people like me hasn't usually led to widespread market success.

So given all the differences between the Apple/iOS/Apple/iPhone model and the Google/Android/Dozens of companies/hundreds of phones model it's hard to say when comparing marketing strategies and measures of success is valid and when it's comparing, well, apples to oranges.

Even the author doesn't quite get it...

[gstrickler]

Some should be showing off new features that Apple doesn't have like the new face unlock feature in Android 4.0.

Yeah, when there are phones shipping with Android 4.0 and front facing cameras that can use the features. Marketing features that aren't yet available to the end users is a REALLY bad idea.

Others should highlight their restrictive model: picture the old Mac vs. PC ads, but with the iPhone checking with Apple before denying the user's request to install an app of their choice.

This would probably backfire, how many trojans and programs that send your info back to the developer's server have been found in the Android marketplace? Lots. Apple would almost certainly use that in a counter-attack ad.

Market your strengths, but be careful of those that also have an underlying weakness/vulnerability, it will come back to bite you.

Android needs more standardization. A standard UI, a minimum resolution, and a minimum hardware set. One of the things Apple has done very effectively is manage the user experience. MS Windows and Android have allowed manufacturers to put out devices with too little RAM, CPU, and/or poor quality screens, keyboards, touch-screens and it hurts the reputation of the platform. When a user buys a bad Windows or Android device, they're as likely to blame the OS as they are the hardware manufacturer. Failing to understand and address that is a marketing failure on the part of the OS vendor.

Marketing to no-one

[SuperKendall]

Watch those, and tell me with a straight face that this is advertising for nerds, by nerds, and by people who have no concept what the words "user experience" means.

I'll grant you that's not by nerds, for nerds.

But how is that anything about user experience? The ad is TOTALLY devoid of any user experience using the phone, looking out from the phone you know nothing at all about how the phone is to use or what it can do.

I am pretty convinced those kinds of ads (and I've seen them for other products) do nothing whatsoever to drive sales. How could they? Why would I remember HTC in connection to 30 seconds of nothing?

Can YOU honestly say with a straight face any of those ads would compel someone to even think about asking to look at HTC phones in a store, much less go out and get one?

I don't have an iPhone 4s. I have an iPhone 4. I didn't really feel like I needed a new phone right now, so I chose to skip this round... but every time I see a 4s commercial I start to question my choice to skip. Those are powerful ads.

Re:Android is not missing anything

[jbolden]

Apple tried the 'vs' ads with their Mac vs Windows, and as popular as those ads were, they didn't help Apple much in sales.

Huh? When Apple started those ads they were a barely profitable niche player. After running those for 5 years (and making improvements) they owned about 80% of the profits from the PC market leaving everyone else fending for who gets to produce boxes for cost. And they are still growing, creating more users willing to pay them hundreds more for their perceived value.