Misleading survey hurts mobile entertainment – how to respond
- Posted by Ephraim Cohen on March 8th, 2006 filed in Corporate Communications, General, Messaging, PR Strategy, Positioning, surveys
- Comments
RBC Financial Group released a survey with some damaging statistics for mobile entertainment For example, it said that 70% of consumers (or 69% to be exact), are not interested in using their cell phones for music entertainment. If I’m a mobile entertainment company, I would look at the report and its fairly decent coverage (e.g., News.com, GigaOm) and start thinking about how to quickly counter such a report.Â
Like so many surveys, especially those put out for public relations purposes, the released results have a major design flaw – they failed to differentiate between consumers that have already tried mobile entertainment like wireless music and those that haven’t.  Ask most consumers if they are interested in a totally new concept and they’ll often say know. That’s why early adopters are so important as they get the mainstream to see that there is value in a new service or technology. A hundred years ago there where plenty of people thinking cars where just a waste of money and a menace to horses. But back to the survey issue.
The solution is fairly simple - counter with a more believable survey that both legitimizes the industries focus (mobile entertainment) while attacking the flawed methodology of RBC’s survey. Â
The industry needs to show how popular mobile entertainment is among those that have already tried it as well as focus on the appropriate user base (a survey of active cell phone users and MP3 player owners instead of just any old consumer). There are already numbers out there (e.g., repeat sales of mobile video games, purchases of mobile music at KDDI or Vodafone etc) that can be used. The RBC report can be easily shown to be massively flawed and positioned as survey methodology that would have kept cars off the road and buggy whips making a fortune.
