Last year’s explosion of the tablet’s market still makes many industry analysts and forecasters dizzy, but the consensus of opinions seem to be, that iPad “owns” the segment with shipping and sold-through numbers.
RBC Capital Markets expects tablet market to reach 185 million units in calendar 2014, up 83 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 17 million in calendar 2010. RBC Capital forecasts global tablet revenue to increase from $11 billion in calendar 2010 to nearly $70 billion in calendar 2014.
In another article somewhat similar numbers were quoted
IDC found that almost 18 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2010–with Apple nabbing 83 percent of the market, which would come out to around 14.9 million tablets shipped.
Although IDC was relying on shipment figures and not actual sales to customers, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did specify sales figures at the iPad 2 unveiling earlier this month. He revealed that Apple sold 15 million iPads to customers in 2010.
However I could not find any reports or even estimates for shipping or sold numbers of any other tablet that is currently on the market, I did see a lot of inquiries though.
For a long time I was interested in the correlation between numbers of products (units) sold and numbers of customer reviews for the product posted online and here I attempt to connect those dots.
Our aggregation algorithms found 1,299 customer reviews for Apple iPad and 294 customer reviews for Samsung Galaxy Tab. Average effectiveness of our algorithms was measured at 87%, in other words they find on average 87 online customer reviews out of 100 that can be found by a skilled, internet savvy research analyst. By applying 13% correction to the number of customer reviews found, and dividing the result by a number of iPads sold we can estimate that Apple had to sell just over 10,000 units to generate just 1 customer review (10,151). The calculations of these ratios for Samsung Galaxy Tab and other Consumer Electronics products produce very consistent results averaging around 0.014%. I did a similar analysis for flat screen TV products a few months ago.
I suggest that there are two practical implications that come out of this reasoning:
1. The average review/product ratios could be used to estimate numbers of products sold in circumstances where such information is not disclosed by a company;
2. The statistical significance of an issue or a benefit, reported by customer in their reviews is dramatically amplified when you consider the low percentage of customers who volunteer such information for public benefit.
Using the above mentioned logic I can offer a rough estimate of sales numbers for other, reasonably popular, tablets currently being sold.
To complete the picture I ran our Opinion Miner software on this data set to produce Customer Intelligence for these products. The result below shows a subset of these product’s attributes that are the most important to their customers, along with measurements of difference between customers expectations and their experience for each attribute. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Please RSVP by Monday, January 24. Registration is limited.
Questions? E-mail the Webcast Team or call 703-907-7797.
Description:
Participants will learn the methods, techniques and best practices for use of online Word of Mouth (WOM) to stimulate demand for CE products; methodology and tools for market research of social media to measure product reputation and customer satisfaction without breaking the bank.
Who should attend:
Marketing Product Managers, Market Research and Market Intelligence professionals, PR and Marketing Communications professionals interested in product and brand equity management.
Presenter Bio:
Gregory Yankelovich has been involved with customer centric product management and marketing, CRM process best practices and their automation for the last 15 years. He currently serves as CEO of Amplified Analytics, the firm that specializes in use of opinion mining and natural language processing technologies for analysis of CE Customer reviews, word of mouth and other forms of customer feedback.
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I am getting ready to buy one, but buying one is just a beginning of the experience. The trick is to select the DMR that will give me more joy than a headache. Somebody said that there are 3 kinds of people:
1. people who learn from other people mistakes
2. people who learn from their own ones, and
3. people who never learn.
Let’s try to be the first kind of people and learn from others about their DMR experiences.
Let’s start with filtering the DMRs that have most customer reviews available on Social Media venues as there is a safety in numbers. I am not saying “Eat shit – 5,000,000 flies can’t be wrong!”, but there is a value in statistically representative information and it is much more difficult to plant a large number of reasonably descriptive customer reviews – just ask the Idiot Marketers who tried and got caught.
Comparing the “stars” of these receivers does not reveal much
as all of them sport 3.5-4 stars forcing me to sift through hundreds of reviews to decipher which one would give me the most satisfaction with the least risk and headache. This problem provided motivation for development of Opinion Miner® software and applications that are using it to produce the following score card.
The green shadowed cells indicate the highest score for an attribute and the red one highlight customer disappointment.
This makes my selection much easier as I can see that Roku XD delighted their customers with most of the attributes important to them. More than any other receiver we considered. However I also have information to make this decision personal, not just following the math – I do not buy from a company that disappoints their customers with Customer Support that makes…..
Drum rolls please!
The winner of 2010 Piplzchoice Award in the Digital Receiver Category is Apple TV 2010
I have written and published reviews online about books and products for over 10 years. Primary motivation for doing it is to share my experience with other consumers to help them make a choice, and with manufacturers to learn about customer experience with their product. I know that only a tiny number of consumers find it important to write the reviews as on the average well under 1% of a product customers review them, but my motivation is the same as most reviewer’s:
Sounds like a truly win-win proposition until dishonest, idiot marketers come with “brilliant” idea to manipulate customer’s feedback. We will never know what financial impact was experienced by Belkin after their reviews manipulating scheme was publicly revealed, but the brand reputation stain keeps lingering years after it became public. Just Google “Belkin reviews scandal”
Belkin became a “poster child”, but it surely is not the only perpetrator of public trust. There is a long list of slimy morons who figured out it is easier to brake the law (yes, it is illegal) than to produce really good product the customers would be inspired to write about. I can’t imagine that economic value of results produced using cheap manipulation can possibly justify the legal and financial risk involved, yet in spite of all scandals and successful legal proceedings the practice continues, and cheap labor providing sites are flooded with ads like this
I don’t want to single out travel industry, but hotels seem to be the worst offenders as these ads are running for years
All of these activities are unethical and illegal, practiced openly through Social Media channels and yet did not destroy public trust in value of Customer Reviews.
Are consumers dumb and unaware of chicanery or is it a testament to human resiliency and faith? My bet is on the second and we will continue to work on development of algorithms to help us minimize influence of the disingenuous product reviews.
As Samsung reported shipping over 600,000 units the first month after introduction, Galaxy Tab customers started to publish reports of their experiences with this exciting product on the online customer review sites and other social media venues. Not surprisingly many of them compare it to Apple iPod tablets.
A new study of 1,142 customer reviews available online, revealed that both tablets Customer Satisfaction exceeds customer expectations by 17% and 15% respectively, which is well within margin of error. Both products fall short of customer expectations when it comes to Price/Value, however Galaxy Tab customers seem to think it offers better value and prefer its smaller size.
Galaxy Tab buyers are citing Android open platform and availability of Flash as critical reason for their purchasing decision, however Samsung and/or carriers poor customer support of this tablet may cause it fail to its claim of becoming an “iPad killer”.
Analysis Methodology: For this study we aggregated consumer-generated reviews published through November 26, 2010 on multiple popular public sites. This data was analyzed with our proprietary Opinion Miner software. The complete data set of competitive products, services and brands selected by Amplified Analytics’ customers is collected, monitored for updates, processed and analyzed through a paid arrangement. Source Data and attributes analysis for each model is available by request at info@amplifiedanalytics.com
In the latest twist in the ongoing battle between RIM and Apple for the hearts of customers, RIM managed to retake the No. 1 ranking in Customer Satisfaction
A new study of 14,701 customer reviews spanning 108 mobile phone models revealed that Blackberry phones gained ground by exceeding customer expectations 8% more than Apple iPhones.
The most interesting rivalry is developing between the latest popular offerings: Blackberry 9800 Torch and the iPhone 4-32GB. Torch is opening a significant lead in perception of Reliability and Customer Support. On the other hand, iPhone delights their customers with screen quality, design and software stability.
Analysis Methodology: For this study we aggregated consumer-generated reviews published through November 15, 2010 on multiple popular public sites. This data was analyzed with our proprietary Opinion Miner software. The complete data set of competitive products, services and brands selected by Amplified Analytics’ customers is collected, monitored for updates, processed and analyzed through a paid arrangement. Source Data and attributes analysis for each model is available by request at info@amplifiedanalytics.com
Many marketers are wrestling with practical implications of Social Media Marketing concept. One of the challenges is a lack of a clear and practical concept definition. Everyone seem to know what it means and doing “something” about it, but only very few can boast a provable and measurable success. I chose to focus on a specific subset of the SMM that in my opinion provides the most effective method on increasing sales without monumental budget requirements.
If you agree that consumers, and that include businesses in context of this conversation, fundamentally shop for “desirable outcome” and a shopping process is focused on risk reduction of achieving that outcome, you would probably see why the customer reviews are so important. Many marketers are often uncomfortable with an idea of funding a messaging effort without retaining control of the content, but that is precisely why this Media is called Social. A customer review is usually a personal “story” describing how a person, who had expectations (possibly similar to yours) experienced reality of of their decision to purchase that product or service. A “negative” review can often sell your product or service more effectively by alleviating prospective customer’s fears because the review writer expectations were different from the the reader’s, the writer’s experience was closer to the reader’s desirable outcome, and negative tone gives the story a lot more credibility.
Let’s assume that I masterfully convinced you that customer reviews, under curtain conditions, provide sizable uplift in sales. If you don’t buy this line of reasoning there is some research on that subjects which supports the premise. You can find here and here. If you knew it all along, you are more interested in what are the “certain conditions”, and how exactly do you get your customers to write these reviews.
Humans communicate by telling the stories – stars (Liekert scales and such), attribute ratings and any other attempts to filter and organize customer reviews, are helpful, but they often fail to produce sales uplift if used excessively. They distract consumers from reading the “stories” and prevent them from personal engagement. The idea of engaging customers in writing more reviews by offering them “fill in the blank” forms often leads to waste and distrust as consumers, who look for this product reviews, feel cheated when they land on the product page with pre-fabricated, check box reviews.
Number of reviews is critically important for production of sales uplift. There is no exact, magic number that would guarantee the desired effect as it is highly contextual to the complexity of the product or service and its price (i.e. risk involved). Too few reviews for a product may make it look not credible to many consumers, and too many reviews may intimidate some from even making the decision. The latter case could possibly be mitigated by thoughtful “filtering” mechanisms and it is not a problem for most marketers. Only a very small number of customers are engaged enough to write a review. I “mashed” TV units shipped data from iSuppli Market Research with a number of reviews for these TV brands available online to come with an average that is well below 1%.
Engaging your customers to write more reviews is probably the most challenging task. There is no shortcuts here. Any marketers who succumbed to a “brilliant” idea of planting reviews written by not-customers should know that it is illegal ( it was successfully prosecuted in NY), it produce adverse effects, and did I mention that it is not ethical? Misleading social media seeding techniques have become so widespread that the European Union enacted Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations to protect the public from the most deceitful activities.
To do it right you need to understand why customers write the reviews on the first place. What are the motivations? There are a few studies conducted by Cone Research and others that delved into this subject. When you understand what motivates very few of your customers to write the reviews you need to select appropriate existing interaction points between your company and a customer, such as warranty registration process or scheduled maintenance, to ask them for it. The way you communicate the request is very important and has to loop back to the motivations. If you ask for endorsement or referral – you miss the mark and fail in this Social Media Marketing class.
As of this date Piplzchoice Award research is read by 15,126 people. In this study we analyzed Mobile Phones. We are currently tracking 98 products in these categories and analyzed 7,529 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.
Blackberry Torch 9800 is a newcomer that quickly captured the top spot for it’s Functionality and Reliability reputation.
RIM Blackberry Torch 9800 2010 Piplzchoice Award winner 59% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category The winners are chosen by their customers
This Phone’ Reliability score is 42% higher than the category average. See mobile phone brands analysis study below. For the free full copy of this study contact greg@amplifiedanalytics.com
As a long time customer of RIM products I decided to check how their new product fares against the other products in that market segment. I hope the finding would be of interest to you as well.
In retrospect I think Apple iPhone 4 phone should have been included into this study, however I was somewhat deterred by suspicious absence of customer reviews in the Apple store and relatively low number of the iPhone 4 reviews on other sites. I did include them into the segment Customer Satisfaction (CSI) brand analysis
Last year’s explosion of the tablet’s market still makes many industry analysts and forecasters dizzy, but the consensus of opinions seem to be, that iPad “owns” the segment with shipping and sold-through numbers.
