What the Consumer Wants

What the Consumer Wants

Over a last few months I have been interacting and reading about the mobile handset market in India and its been one of the most tricky business for some time now.

Since many years Nokia was a monopoly and was percolating deep into the Indian rural and urban market. With market share of more than 70% it wasn’t surprising when Nokia started their assembling plant near Chennai with sizeable investment and a staggering rollout of more than 2 million phones per month!!

But the scene started changing slowly and the technology market started to become highly un-predictable with the entry of dozens of new players everyday. Apart from the Korean and Taiwan dumps the country saw many registered mobile handset makers invade into the market share of the biggies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola.

The mobile market became as tricky as the film industry. It became very hard to research what the customer/consumer wants. And the time to market needed to be very very fast. Just take the technology pace in the data transfer technologies. Imagine the time gap between infrared to Bluetooth to wifi to 3G and so on. By the time a technology is adapted to on a mobile phone a new technology arrives and customers are always on the look out.

Just few months back and during the IPL this year a new handset maker called micromax entered into the populated market and within 3-4 months he is already the third largest seller with market share of more than 20%. If you look closely at what they did best? It was aggressive marketing, branding and put all in one strategy. They looked at what all a customer needed and put it all in one at a very competitive rate.

A week back I read in business India magazine that a PCO (public telephone booth) vendor in one of the remote villages in India used to travel 2 kms everyday in the evening to charge up his battery. The battery was the source for power to his telephones and the place where he operated had no electricity. But today he has a phone made by micromax that keeps running for 7 days continuously without a charge and he used it happily even without wires (BSNL lost yet another customer :)). Things like these are simple to read but interestingly for many users these days, what’s important it how long the mobile can run without a charge, than the features a phone has. There is no time for many to charge their phones since they use it non-stop.

If you thinking how many myriad things drive this handset market… Let me try to list.. Cost, features, games, connectivity, e-mail, 3G, data transfer, wifi, camera, battery life, resolution, look and feel, video recording and so on and so on…

To make it a perfect strategy to manufacture one phone is almost impossible. Do you really agree? Read on..

And driving down to bring a philosophical angle as I usually do, there is one company that makes costly phones with low features and with very ordinary marketing but still maintains to be a monopoly in the market. And the company is the great Apple Inc. Every product they launch including their iPhone is highly criticized and reviewed. Yet it stands out to be awe’d at and irrespective of its cost is always sought after.

Now on to my closing down thoughts. What the consumer wants is the most tricky maze/puzzle to crack always. Very few companies can crack it and those are the ones which stay while others go up the spike and then slowly fall to get buried.

Whatever is the case I always bet that quality, durability/longevity and class will always be alive. It will have its pickers and will survive to emerge stronger.