Inside Mobile Marketing

RIM recently announced their Q1 2008 earnings results and APPLE of course has let the world know they are shipping their iPhone 3G on July 11th. From a Mobile Marketer’s perspective there were a couple of interesting nuggets within the press releases and subsequent flurry of related press.

At the end of Q1 2008 - RIM had 16 million Blackberry subscribers.

• 33% of RIM subscribers are outside of North America (meaning 10.72M BB users in U.S.)
• 2.3 million subscribers were added in Q1 of which 60% of these additions were non-enterprise users.
• Non-enterprise users now comprise over 40% of total subscribers (meaning 6.4M)

As of June 9th 2008, APPLE’s Steve Jobs has claimed to have sold 6 million first generation iPhones on a global basis. The vast majority of which are used in the U.S. In October 2007, nearly one out of four owners of the iPhone was a woman, according to Nielsen. By March 2008 that number rose to one in three.

According to IDC report, RIM’s marketshare of the U.S. market for smartphones rose to 44.5% in the first quarter of 2008 from 35.% in the fourth quarter of ‘07 while iPhone’s share fell to 19.2% from 26.7% in the fourth quarter of ‘07.

According to Nielsen Mobile the number of American women using smartphones in 2007 more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men.

While these numbers are impressive and attest to the impact smartphones sales have had on various players within the Mobile Ecosystem, it is important for Mobile Marketers to remember that smartphones (especially Blackberries and iPhones) still represent a small percentage of the overall handset market in the U.S. and especially the World. Recent figures from M:Metrics/comScore peg overall smartphone penetration within the U.S. at around 6-7% of the total wireless subscriber base. On a global basis, RIM and APPLE combined only make up at best 1+% of the overall wireless subscriber market.

According to Gartner, Nokia is still king of the global smartphone market with 45% share of market and RIM follows second with 13.4% and Apple comes in third with 5.3% as of Q1 2008.

That said, marketers can certainly build campaigns that are targeted to and optimized for the Blackberry and iPhone toting crowd, however the greatest reach - especially with a younger demographic - still resides in targeting the lower to mid-range handsets in the U.S. from Motorola, LG and Samsung.

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