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Once seen as just a business tool, smartphones are gaining market share among all walks of life, especially women.  A New York Time’s article  reports that the number of women who owned a smartphone increased to one in three owners as of March 2008.  This is a huge increase from October 2007 when only one out of every four owners of a smartphone was female.  So why the surge?

Many smartphone manufacturers are targeting marketing and design efforts towards women, which could be responsible for the shift in demographics.  Research In Motion designers unveiled the Blackberry Pearl, a sleek, compact, and pink version of its more business-looking original Blackberry model back in January 2008.  As vice president of marketing Mark Guibert said, “It [pink] was the only color that was purely driven by the female audience. Years ago the market was much more focused solely on function. Now there is more focus on lifestyle.”

According to a recent Nielsen Mobile study, men and women base much of their purchasing decision on the same factors.  For men, the top three priorities are Wi-Fi, Internet capability (18%), Band, reliability (12%), and Keyboard (11%).  For women, the top three priorities are Wi-Fi/Internet capability (14%), Price (14%) and Keyboard (14%).  Where some interesting statistics come into play is the fourth deciding factor.  Men weigh Price and Design/Style equally at 9% each.  Whereas women consider Design/Style more heavily at 12% followed by equally weighted Brand/Reliability and Ease of use at 7% each.

Additional research shows other reasons for the increase of smartphone purchases by women.  As noted by another New York Times article “Can the Cell Phone Help End Global Poverty”, “…it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two.”  It appears that the the purchase of cellphones increases exponentially in significantly decreasing time intervals.  Also, according to MobileTechReview.com, there are currently 118 different models of smartphones to choose from, 25 of which became available after October of 2007.  The smartphone is no longer a novelty but becoming more of a mainstream option.  You might as well write an article on how amazing it is that one in three women use thumbdrives instead of 3.5″ floppies for data storage.

Simplification, in business, is often the best way to go.  However, oversimplification can often lead to wasted resources.  To assume that increase in a demographic is due to a color choice or specific ad campaign without weighing in on increase in product availability and other equally important ad campaigns (Holiday 2007 campaign), is misleading.  It is easy to see as smartphones become the standard, more and more women will use the scheduling, texting, and internet capabilities to keep track of their families’ activities just as they do for their workplace projects.

Friday, June 20th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Alicen Hogan