Raising consumer awareness of music content

Rating: And other helpful spin-offs from the iPhone
by Tony Dennis

One of my colleagues has just wreaked havoc
by insinuating that Vodafone was involved in dirty tricks to try to stop
existing customers from defecting to O2 thanks to the iPhone’s launch.

The allegations proved to be completely
unfounded. Only a tiny number of callers experienced any problems with
Vodafone’s customer care over the last weekend.

However, it did produce an extremely interesting response from Vodafone. A
spokesperson happily announced that the number of consumers visiting its own
retail stores had shot up last weekend.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of those visitors had been inquiring
about access to music from a mobile phone. Vodafone employees had then promptly
steered such inquiries towards the Nokia N95 and Vodafone’s own MusicStation
offering.
This is an intriguing instance of how a rival product can raise awareness. So I
decided to follow this discovery up. There’s obviously a whole host of
facilities which existing consumers remain blithely unaware of.
One of these is that their existing handset is already an MP3 player – albeit a
rather pathetic and restricted version of an MP3 player. But the capability is still
there.
Hence I explained to a drinking buddy that she didn’t need to buy an iPod just
to listen to MP3s on holiday. It would be a relatively simple task to download
some tracks onto her ageing Nokia.
Better still, in order to demonstrate such a capability I leant her a pair of
genuine Nokia earphones. And in order to let her listen – since there were no
MP3s loaded on her handset – I demonstrated the built-in radio.
She was totally shocked. The handset had been in her possession for at least
four years and she had no idea that a regular FM radio was one of its
capabilities.
Spurred on by this discovery she showed me a recent text she’d received from Orange. To her the
message was totally unintelligible. It said she’d got 1 MB left of free access
to OrangeWorld that month.

Never mind the fact that 1 MB was
meaningless to her. She wasn’t even aware what OrangeWorld was. I admit that
previous attempts to describe the likes of OrangeWorld as the ability to
"surf the mobile Internet" have proved disastrous.
Nevertheless, awareness that handsets can access the same kinds of facilities
that the standard web browser on PCs can offer is obviously painfully low.
The iPhone is reputed to have an excellent web browser. So perhaps all those dormant
browsers inside Nokia phones will suddenly be discovered and put to serious
use.

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2. The Cloud looks at location based music content
3. Nokia World 2007: Mobile Music - Nokia comes with music?
4. Vodafone Germany offers Mobile Music Client and Vodafone Music Manager
5. Silverback Media Partners with digital music provider Puretracks for music and content promotion