Both Bango and BuzzCity released mobile metrics with a brand slant today. BuzzCity took a look at which brands are the most recognisable and the most popular amongst mobile Internet users, and Bango has revealed that Blackberry is seeing a huge amount of mobile browsing.
Bango and Blackberry:
At the heart of the claim from payment and analytics firm Bango is that three times more people browse the mobile Web on a BlackBerry than on an iPhone. Nokia devices are still the global leader, but Blackberry has slid up 5th place worldwide and 3rd in the States. RIM devices rank higher than the iPhone in every market. Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango compared the Blackberry to Usain Bolt in the mobile device race, saying that “with all the buzz surrounding the Apple iPhone… many companies fail to realize that over three times more consumers browse the web from a BlackBerry.”
What makes Blackberry so much more popular than iPhone for web-browsing? For one thing, the Blackberry has been around a lot longer. The device has had a long time to build up an audience base – and now that slicker, more consumer-friendly devices like the Curve and Storm have hit the market, the Blackberry is being seen less and less as a dry, utilitarian business device. According to payments and analytics firm Bango, the Curve alone accounts for over 28% of BlackBerrys browsing the web.
BuzzCity and KFC:
BuzzCity combines a community of mobile social networks with mobile media and analytics. It has used the large number of mobile users connected to its various networks to run a survey on which brands the mobile Internet audience find most appealing. It was a global study, and looked at both the who and why of mobile brands. First of all, it looked at what it is that attracts mobile Internet users to a brand. In order of importance, respondents said the things they look for are:
1) Brand performance. 64% of respondents felt that the quality of their brand was the best, or the most reliable.
2) Style. 14% cited how unique, popular or expensive the product was.
3) Price. 9% went for the value for money of the brand.
Ok – so that’s what people look for in brands. So by those standards, what were the brands that users liked the best?
A large part of this survey was also to discover whether or not mobile users will recommend brands to their peers. The answer to that is yes, according to KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity who says “mobile surfers are ardent brand advocates and will regularly make recommendations to peers. To encourage this, there is the potential for brands to share more product information through the mobile platform. This would be especially potent in the food sector where domestic brands dominate.”" The study claims that 54% of mobile users would recommend a brand to their peers.
What we think?
The Bango release highlights something that I think is endemic in the mobile industry at the moment, and that’s a habit of getting distracted by the shiniest things around. But the tables are beginning turn on the iPhone at the moment. Not only is it quite far down the list of handsets for web browsing, but recent reports suggest that operators selling it are making a loss globally. Add to that the trouble it’s having with the FCC, and Apple starts to look a little shaky in the area of mobile.
Then there’s the BuzzCity release, which I find interesting for an entirely different reasons. The survey seemed to ask several unrelated questions, and then falsely link them up. So KFC is the leading mobile brand globally. That’s great. But the survey didn’t go into why it is the leading brand globally. Asking people what they might find interesting in a brand in general on the mobile Web is entirely different from asking they why they found KFC interesting. What has KFC actually done to attract this attention? We don’t know. For more details on the BuzzCity survey, you can download the PDF of their report here.
