iPhone users are contagious

The expansion of smartphones in the mobile markets is now clearly taking place, in both mature and emerging markets. In Telenor, we experience their take off both in Nordics, Central Europe, and Asia. When buying a smartphone, it seems that our customers normally choose between two dominant types: iPhone or Android. Why do they choose one or another, and to what extent does their social environment drive their decision? Telenor’s researchers Johannes Bjelland, Geoffrey Canright, Kenth Engø-Monsen, Rich Ling, and Pål Sundsøy have some answers to these questions.

The group had been studying product spreading for years. They previously concluded that iPhone spreads largely through groups of socially connected people. Same goes for iPad; if exactly one of your friends has iPad, the chance that you will buy one is 14 times higher than if none of your friends is using it.

“Almost every product we looked at shows this strong viral spreading effect. This includes the devices, products like Mobile broadband, even the services that are maybe not as appealing and viral as Iphone—for example, the Mobil Kontroll security product for Norwegian business customers” said Geoffrey Canright.

Apple users live in “a tribe”, Android users don’t care
Are the Android users equally sensitive to their social environment as those with iPhone? The answer is – no. An average iPhone user has 12 friends who are also using iPhone, and only 3,6 who are not. At the same time, an Android user does not have any detectable statistical preference in that sense – having approximately the same number of friends using each.

All other analyses confirm the picture from this one—that iPhone users have much stronger awareness of the brand they choose, than those carrying Android handsets.

“iPhone and Android are capturing two different segments,” Canright explains. “Although the number of Android and Apple users in the Telenor network in Norway is approximately the same, iPhone users are much more loyal to the Apple brand, and apparently more eager to spread the word among their friends.”

Together with his colleagues, he recently presented  a comparison of social effects in adoption of Apple and Android to the WIDS conference  (Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks)  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

“We compared the results obtained through different methods, and could only confirm what we found earlier: Android users have, by many different statistical measures, almost exactly the same behavior as ‘brand-indifferent’ users, while Apple users are clearly very different, in that brand matters very much for them,” Canright says.

The Apple Tribe
Not only this latest study, but also previous research done by Canright and his colleagues confirms that Apple users are quite “contagious”, affecting their friends’ choices. In fact, if one of your friends already has an Apple product, it strongly increases your chances to buy a different Apple product. For example, an iPad user who is connected to another iPad user has a 72 percent chance of having an iPhone.  “We called this phenomenon the Apple tribe,” says Geoffrey Canright. “We see a “tribe” of connected users and Apple devices, living happily together.”

Reflections of this brand loyalty can also be seen when people change their phones. 70 percent of iPhone users buy again an iPhone when they want to renew their favourite gadget, with 42 percent of these upgrading to a new iPhone model.

Your phone says something about you
In addition to analyzing loyalty to respective operative systems, Telenor researchers learn more about the people using the two different operative systems:

A typical iPhone user would then be a very social person, with many friends, between 25 and 50 years old, living in the city, and there is a slightly higher chance that it is a man.

Smartphones users in general are more social and have more friends than those using feature phones. Apple users lead again in the number of friends, ahead of Android. The smartphones are also used more by men than by women, with Android having higher a percentage of male users. Finally, Android is currently stronger than Apple among 20-year-olds, while Apple wins among those who are 25—50 years old.