Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Apple and Samsung both announced a decrease of market share
yesterday, what are the consequences of this loss of market share for
themselves, competitors??
The media crystal ball has spoken:
“Market leader Samsung shipped 89 million smartphones worldwide in Q1
2014 compared to 69.4 million in the same period last year, according to
Strategy Analytics. Its global market share now stands at 31.2%, down from
32.4% a year earlier. Apple, meanwhile, shipped 43.7 million iPhones in Q1
2014, up from last year’s 37.4 million device total over the same period. Its
total market share dropped from 17.5% to 15.3%.”
So, the twin titans of smartphones have taken a trip. Since their
combined market share has fallen below the psychological mark of 50%, and if
the law of gravity is to be obeyed, we can expect consequences for the loss.
Questions abound: Would the queues outside their stores get shorter? Would
their Telco partners drop them in their ‘free-phone’ deals to attract
subscriber for line sign-up or reactivation? Would they face stiffer competition
in media buy and higher costs of raising their market voice?
The Legend of the Fall
“The report cites strong growth of “second-tier smartphone brands” such
as Huwaei and Lenovo and lack of entry-level devices in markets abroad from
Apple as the main contributors to slowed growth for Samsung and Apple.”
“Research firm IDC noted that Huawei, Lenovo and LG made up the rest of
the top five smartphone vendors in the market, and Strategy Analytics had
Huawei and Lenovo as No. 3 and No. 4, respectively (it did not include results
for LG, which reported Tuesday that it shipped 12.3 million smartphones in the
first quarter).”
It seems that cheaper phones and hungrier competitors have caught up
with Samsung and Apple. Entering the market are multiple Chinese vendors including Coolpad, Xiaomi, and ZTE. Now,
Samsung/Apple customers have more options to switch loyalty. Why won’t they if they can
enjoy the same performance and user benefits from viable alternatives as powerful as Ximi
phones?
Losing Mindshare and Impact on
Marketing
Exodus or not, the loss of customer loyalty is an expensive episode to
recover from. Previously, users would be searching for ‘samsung’ or ‘apple’
when they trawl the web for product info and deals. Now, other brand names are
jumping into their choice sets. To keep top spots in the searches, Samsung and
Apple face stiffer competition in auction bids for top listings. Competition has
an impact marketing budget, you need to out-spend competitors to keep a market
voice loud enough to make a difference.
Entry-level phone sellers are drawing smaller margins, and carry heavier
burden of marketing budget which needs to be big enough to buy a market voice. Out-spending
them in search marketing strategies would probably help Samsung and Apple maintain a market leader’s visibility in the media/world wide web, but the
question is how much and how long do they keep out-spending? To their
competitors, if Samsung and Apple kept their resolve to outspend them, it is
lose-lose situation for all the parties. Media war benefits the media owners, the
likes of Murdoch who will be laughing to the bank. Higher media costs mean
lower margins, and marketing war chest shrinks further if shareholders demand
more pay-out.
Time to Get
Creative The way out is for Samsung, Apple and all the competitors to get
creative and smarter with their marketing. Go for brand differentiation rather than
performance comparison, loyalty-driven promotions rather than price discounts, and
even cool accessories such as a wearable watch like Samsung Galaxy Gear can be
the sticky factor to retain customers before they jump ship.
For their competitors, the loss of market share demonstrates opportunities to leapfrog the giants – Samsung/Apple customers are switching, but
what can they offer to stand out? Their marketing engine must crank up targeted search
and if they have a wonderful product to rival Samsung/Apple, now is the time to
get out and loud. Their websites must contain latest and most updated info.
Product videos, demonstrations and customer reviews should be visible and
available. Search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, and even social
media marketing are now their must-have weapons of mass-marketing destruction of
their rival brands. Rest is for the weak, time to go for Samsung/Apple's jugular!
What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search
marketing?
Unless you have found the Sultan Mahmud’s gold bullion in our neighbour’s
yard (read: Could Malacca treasure be
Sultan Mahmud's riches?), you should ask the question “Why did the chicken
cross the road?” as you carefully weigh the pros and cons before diving into
search marketing.
If want to get really lucky, here is the map for the Malacca treasure:
Good luck joining the poor chaps who are hammering and drilling for the
gold, they deserve a return on their money and efforts. Which brings us back to
the real topic of returns: what are the
returns for dabbling in search marketing? Every carrot seems to be tied to
a stick, so what are the drawbacks?
The Story of Search Marketing
It is an internet marketing strategy for optimising your website and
positioning it as ‘search engine’ friendly for the paid/sponsored and
unpaid/organic searches. With over 2.5 billion internet users out there, it is
vital for your marketing plan. To get started, you need Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO) - your website content, layout and indexing, resources and
tagging must be best practice. Give tips, info and resources that people want. SEO
achieves highest unpaid listing for searches and helps Search engine marketing
(SEM) to be successful too.
SEM takes over from SEO by promoting your website to increase the
visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Millions and billions of
people will know you by clicking the mouse. It include paid listing, contextual
advertising and paid inclusion.
Here is a neat diagram explaining what it
involves:
How it Works
You become an advertiser in the search engine world now dominated by
Google, Yahoo and BING, as well as Yandex, Baidu, etc for non-English speaking
folks. Your website will appear on the top and right hand sides of the first page
and receive the most click throughs. More web visitors means more sales
opportunities. The magic of SEM!
It’s Always Carrot and Stick
We can quickly pick up the benefits:
- WWW never sleeps, so your website gets traffic 24x7. With over 94% of Internet users using search engines to find what they’re looking for, having an effective SM is vital!
- Cost is spread over returns - Using everything from location placement to network targeting, it is very targeted so when right prospects come knocking on your web door, it is easier to convert them into customers.
- Fast to implement - website launch takes weeks and SEM campaign takes a few months to kick in, you get results within the same year unlike traditional media.
- Measurable and flexible – SM campaigns generate tons of data on user responses, you don’t need a crystal ball to spot problems. By directly linking your marketing dollars to returns, you can change tactics such as updating site content, different keywords instead of guessing what went wrong.
- Maximise visibility – the more people find your website and easier, faster and before your competitors, you win a mile ahead. This is huge plus for your brand, organisation, sales and your job-safe-keeping.
- SEM is often referred to as PPC or
Pay-Per-Click advertising. As the name tells you - there are payments
involved, and SEM or PPC can be very costly.
- The devil is in the details, and the
complexity of managing SM campaigns can be overwhelming. Dealing with
settings, targeting, and optimising strategies takes a lot of time and
expertise. Expect more white hair!
- Competition doesn’t go away, including the
mother-in-laws. Companies with deeper pockets and bigger teams dominate.
Increased competition means higher costs of marketing for you, so be mentally
prepared to out-spend, out-wit and out-play these buggers!
Food for thought:
"Research shows that organic
search engine listings receive about 75 % of all traffic, while sponsored
listings using SEM only receives 25% of the traffic. Still organic traffic and
traffic gained through SEM converts almost equally to buyers in percentage of
the clicks. A normal conversion rate is claimed to be 1%-3%. These conversion
rates are good. You should then keep in mind that the increase of using Search
Engine Optimisation SEO over Search Engine Marketing SEM is approximately 270%!”
Monday, 12 May 2014
Apple and Samsung both announced a decrease of market share recently, what are the consequences of this loss of market share for themselves, competitors??
Samsung faced tough competition from Apple at the higher-end of the smartphone market and from Chinese brands such as Huawei at the lower-end.
Apple’s loss of share is down to continued lack of presence in the entry-level category (aka: there’s still no budget iPhone) - where it’s losing volumes in fast-growing emerging markets such as Latin America. At the premium end of the smartphone segment Apple is continuing to perform strongly and on top of this, the lack of new features in recent releases has seemed to result in the company losing their market share.
Also, there are threats from Microsoft who had some significant gains in the European Union Five market compared to last year, climbing 5.3 percentage points even there was no growth in China over last year.
Huawei and Lenovo are both threatening to take more marketshare from the market leaders.
Huawei is expanding swiftly in Europe, while Lenovo continues to grow aggressively outside China into new regions such as Russia.
If various governments approve Lenovo’s Motorola takeover, that joint company will prove an even greater threat to Apple and Samsung later.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search marketing
Search marketing, a process of gaining traffic and
visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts. It
encompasses:
SEO: Earning
traffic through unpaid or free listings
SEM: Buying
traffic through paid search listings
Below
are the pros and cons of having a SEM:
Organic Search
Organic search are non-paid search result as compared to those paid ads.
Advantages:
It’s free! Search engines
don’t charge to have our website come up in results. However, it takes a lot of time and effort to
develop the most relevant web presence. And in this business, time is money. Of
course, we can hire an SEO firm to do it for us, which is an investment much
easier to measure.
It’s trustworthy. People trust organic results a lot more
than paid advertising. They are much more likely to click on organic listings
than on a paid ads.
Disadvantages:
Lack of Control: there are a lot of factors and elements
that are out of our control when dealing with organic results. What our competition
does, our past history, and Google’s constantly evolving result preferences
are all out of our control
Unknown Factors: Google is fairly secretive about what they
use a formula for “relevant” sites. While we do know some general “best
practices” Google likes to see, it’s not 100% clear what will drive your page
to the top.
Paid search traffic
Paid traffic can take many forms including ads on search
engines, ads within context, social media ads, etc. This type of traffic often
takes the form of pay-per-click, where by clients only pay for visitors who
have clicked on their ad.
Advantages:
Cost Control: with the payment set up, we can set budgets
and limit how much we spend on a daily basis to ensure you’re not going over
budget. Similarly we can manage each keyword’s bid to help target higher
returning keywords.
Disadvantages:
Complexity of managing campaigns: There are a lot of
settings, targeting, and optimization strategies that can be used for
profitable campaigns. Organizing and strategizing these can take a lot of time
and expertise.
Competition:
increased competition in this market has driven costs up, more so in
certain markets. Higher competition also
means that those companies with big budgets and man power.
Conclusion
Search continues to become more and more complex as time
goes on. Paid search campaign shave
introduced special shopping results, location extensions, and click-to-call
capabilities.
Organic results now feature local businesses, images, news, and even
location adjustments. What we can be
sure of is that the landscape is constantly changing, so a real commitment to
user experience and targeting is important in developing a search engine marketing
campaign for any kind.
Apple and Samsung loses smartphone market share
Apple and Samsung loses smartphone market share
The recent report by
Strategy Analytics showed that both Apple and Samsung had lost market share in
the mobile phone market. It is
interesting to note that both Samsung and Apple actually shipped more devices
during the first quarter of 2014 as compared to last year. What this means is that both companies are
still growing in the mobile market, just that they are not growing as fast as
the market itself is.
The main reason for
this drop in market share can be due to the fact that a bulk of the share is actually
coming from emerging markets, especially China.
This is seen by both Huawei and Lenovo growing
their shipments. Both Chinese firms
accounted for 4.7 percent of the market during the first quarter of 2014.
The emergence of more cheaper Android handsets
are beginning to eat into market shares of Samsung and Apple and it is becoming
more evident now. Apple haven’t been
catering to emerging markets and have yet to release any entry-level smartphone
that is more affordable to consumers in these regions. Innovation has played an important role in
the success of the Apple’s products.
However, the lack of new killer features in recent releases has seemed
to result in the company losing their market share. This, coupled with the fact that there is a
lack in an entry-level smartphone model, resulted in Apple losing their status
as a the market leader over the years.
Despite the lack of presence in this area,
Apple is still performing very strongly at
the premium end of the smartphone segment.
As a result, Samsung continues to face tough competition from Apple
at the higher-end of the smartphone market and from Chinese brands such
as Huawei and Lenovo at the lower-end.
Huawei is beginning to expand into
Europe and Lenovo recently announced their plans to takeover Motorola. If the takeover is approved, these companies
will create a bigger competition for the two market leaders.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of search marketing?
Search marketing could be broken down
into two entities. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Organic listing
and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – Paid listing. Search marketing
have become an important part of a marketing plan, especially so,
with the widely use of search engine. Starting as a directory, search
engine evolved with the stellar growth of website and webpage on the
internet. With this growth, search engines have become a new avenue
for marketers, as part of their marketing campaign to acquire traffic
and customers.
Out of the many, the top three search
engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. With 2 billion searches done
daily on Google alone, it is now an important marketers’ choice for
promoting their products or services.
Drawbacks
One of the main drawbacks of search
engines, that have been a marketer’s nightmare, is that they are
known to keep changing their algorithm in determining the ranking on
the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Search engines rankings also
take a long process to be listed especially for organic listings.
Apart from that, there is the steep learning curve for someone to do
it themselves or the cost to hire someone to do SEO for their page.
For a site owner, there is also the need to make sure that the
contents are relevant and sites to be search engine friendly to be
able to get a good result in their Quality Score. This is a long
process, where site owners have to wait for the search engine spiders
to crawl the site to get it listed.
For paid listings, there is the missed
opportunity as many searchers would over-look the paid listing and
click on the organic listings. For some popular search terms, it
could be too competitive and expensive for small businesses.
Benefits
One of the benefits to search marketing
is that it is measurable that you can directly measure its
effectiveness when executing a campaign. Be it from the number of
click-through to the number of views of the website. If you are using
paid listings, your page could be listed as fast as within a few
minutes. Many marketers found search marketing to be the most
effective, with higher ROI compared to other traditional marketing.
Another benefit of search marketing is that it is non-intrusive,
whereby the person being marketed to is more receptive as they are
usually somewhere in the buying cycle.
Implementing search marketing also
improves visibility and particularly for paid listing, this result in
immediate traffic. It is also the easiest to implement and has the
ability for testing. The search result being presented to the viewers
are also relevant to what they had searched for.
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