iPhone 3G to lure pre-payers to contracts - survey
20 per cent of Brits want a Jesus Phone
One in five Brits would like to buy a 3G iPhone, but more would put down their hard-earned if O2's tariffs were less pricey.
So claims market watcher GfK NOP on the back of an online survey carried out over the past weekend. It talked to 750 people, and the results were "weighted to give a nationally representative sample of UK mobile phone owners".
The research revealed that 68 per cent of the UK's mobile phone owners haven't even heard of the 3G iPhone, suggesting Apple's marketing is not perhaps as pervasive as some observers have assumed.
That figure falls to three per cent if you focus on the 16-24 age range, and, perhaps surprisingly, only 44 per cent of folk over 60 haven't hear of the iPhone 3G.
That leaves 20 per cent of phone owners keen to have a second-gen Jesus Phone. A further seven per cent said they'd like one too, but not at what O2 wants off them each month for airtime.
Now we know that O2's unlikely to get pay-as-you-go iPhones out in the near future - closer to Christmas, in fact - pre-pay customers make have changed their mind about the Apple handset. But when NOP conducted its survey 16 per cent of PAYG customers said they'd consider switch to a monthly subscription to get an iPhone.
Of that 16 per cent, two-thirds said they'd rather have an 18-month contract than a pre-pay handset.
It's clear then that the subsidy O2 is applying to the handset is going to win over mainstream punters put off by the original iPhone's high price and the unsubsidised price of the PAYG 3G iPhone.
"O2 and Apple have addressed most of the barriers which held back mass-market take-up of the original iPhone, so we expect the iPhone 3G to sell well," said GfK director Anders Nielsen.
COMMENTS
@Muzchap - that made me laugh!!
Muzchap, you need to CALM DOWN a bit, fella... and while you're there, how about we start dealing in some real evidence here rather than your own bizarre rhetoric....
Fact: GfK NOP did this study off their own backs (for PR purposes you might say). The results would not have been published by the agency if they had done the research on behalf of either O2 or Apple as it wouldn't be GfK's intellectual property. And before you ask, I work in O2's marketing department, so I'm pretty confident in this statement.
Fact: 750 is a perfectly respectable sample size, regardless of the entire population 'universe'. Your own logic on this might sound right to you, but it's cobblers. There comes a point where surveying more and more people has no discernable impact on the outcome. You'd need to understand stats to appreciate what I'm talking about here. A sample of 750 out of 64 million is infinitely more reliable than a sample of 30 out of 100.
Fact: The soup analogy is absolutely spot on. You my friend are not.
Fact: No corporate 'big cheese' as you put it would stay in his/her job long if (s)he just employed agencies to tell him/her what he wants to hear. The research agency wouldn't last long either, nor would they put their name to research that was fudged to tell the right story.
Market research / polling is a totally respectable industry - it's the (ab)users of the data that give it a bad rep.
I thought competition was supposed to work in our favor...
Come on, Microsoft. Where's Aero Mobile? Windows CE 5 is proven and more than capable. Just give us a graphics accelerated thumb friendly front end and a web browser that shames Safari already.
I swear, I miss when companies went overkill to outdo their competition. I'm just so sick of this "the least we can do" approach that most are taking now (see Nintendo and their slightly-faster-Gamecube-with-accelerometers).
Mine's the depressed looking one saddened by the lack of willingness to compete.
Facts vs propaganda
OK, there are two types of surveys - the ones companies use to understand the market and the ones used to puff up thier new product. Can you guess which one Apple were paying their money for?
Surveys are extremely easy to manipulate; for example, an on-line survey will naturally include a much higher percentage of technophiles than a phone survey. A survey that sends out 10000 emails and counts only the first 1000 will get an even higher percentage of technophiles than would be found in the population.
If the survey was a pop-up window on iTunes website, and it offered the chance of winning an iPhone, then I'd suggest that the only people who would fill in the survey would be those who wanted an iPhone.
I want to see a link to a description of the way the survey group was selected before I believe this.
Where's the Linux angle on this?
Usually we should have two or three freetards chipping in and being totally OT and irrelevant by now....?
re: I was in the market for a PAYG iPhone.....
Unfortunately, due to the very low level of stock that Apple is supplying O2, O2 had to postpone plans for PAYG.
The company makes far more profit on contracts and with the pitifully small stock (believe me the 'few dozen units per store' that O2 claims is balderdash – it’s a lot worse than that), it doesn’t make financial sense for it to offer PAYG when so many (more profitable) customers want iPhones.
If Apple had supplied O2 and CW with the amount of units each company wanted, PAYG would be on offer – you’re blaming the wrong company.
Sucks for would-be PAYG customers – but it’s amazed me how many disgruntled would-be PAYG owners on forums, are acting like they’re premier customers and that their £10 per month could make or break O2.
