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BGR writes that according to a new report from Kantar Worldpanel, carriers have been pushing prospective smartphone buyers away from the iPhone and towards other phones, and in particular, Samsung phones.
Polling smartphone buyers in the US, Kantar found that 63% of customers who bought a device in Q12014 were recommended a Samsung device, which is double the percentage of those recommended an Apple device, and 10 times those who were recommended a Nokia device.
As you might expect, this has had a big impact on Samsung’s sales, with 59% of those buyers who had been recommended a Samsung going on to buy a Samsung. In fact, only 6% of those who had been recommended a Samsung device went on to buy an iPhone.
So why are the carriers seemingly so intent on getting people to buy a Samsung product rather than an Apple one? BGR says that it is mainly because of the iPhone’s high subsidy cost for the carriers, who are unhappy about Apple having too much market power, because they think that the more popular the iPhone becomes the more Apple can push for even higher subsidies.
Another reason is because of the incredible loyalty of iPhone customers. Once they’ve had one iPhone, they don’t want to return to any other make of smartphone.
“Consumers purchasing Apple’s iPhone models are the ones doing the least amount of pre-purchase research,” said Kantar. This is because such is the iPhone name and reputation, the customers don’t need any recommendations from anyone else to persuade them.
As to why the carriers are so keen to push Samsung’s phones, which also have heavy carrier subsidies? Well as yet, neither Kantar, nor BGR, has an answer for that mystery! To be continued…
Source: http://bgr.com/2014/08/08/iphone-6-vs-galaxy-s5-2/
