The theme of the Consumer Electronics Show was ‘The Year of the Tablet,’ and more than 80 were introduced at the show. In this cacophony of device debuts, what’s most important for marketers to know? What follows are four questions and answers that will help put tablets in perspective.
Question: Do any of the more than 80 tablets introduced at CES have a chance of coming close to the iPad’s success?
Answer: What’s happening with tablets is very similar to what happened in the smartphone market. In whatever the category—Apple has one device. And that one device is always being measured against many other devices in the same category. Samsung introduced the Galaxy Tab in the fourth quarter of 2010 and it did pretty well, but it’s unlikely that any single tablet coming out is going to outsell the iPad. It’s more of a question of whether collectively they will reach parity with the iPad.
What we’ve seen in the smartphone space in the past 12 months, as Android has expanded dramatically, is that the growth from Android has been straight up and the growth of the iPhone has been largely flat.
So it stands to reason that we’ll see a similar dynamic in the tablet market. Apple had the lion’s share of the market in 2010 because it basically had the market all to itself. But most forecasters see other tablets on other platforms—not individual tablets but tablets on competing operating systems, specifically Android—chipping away at Apple’s lead.
Question: Let’s say you’re a brand manager and you’ve budgeted a little money to experiment with tablets in 2011. What’s the smartest thing you can do with that money?
Answer: Of course, it depends on the brand and on the objectives. If you’re a marketer and you’re doing display advertising, you are faced with similar choices as you are with smartphones. If you are trying to build awareness, you can do some display advertising on the tablet. You either go with the mass-market approach on one or more of the many mobile ad networks, or you invest the significant resources to put up an iAd, which would then restrict you to the Apple platform.
Naturally there are apps as well and they require some investment—of both resources and in developing attainable goals and objectives. An app does need to be accompanied by some solid thinking about where the app fits within the larger brand strategy, but it remains a solid approach, especially if you want to deliver an immersive experience. Branded utilities—apps that carry the brand name and which do something useful for the end user—also work quite well, such as an airline app that allows users to book flights and check in.
One thing that Apple did intelligently with the iPad is that it developed the platform to handle apps designed specifically to run on the larger form factor. That’s not something that the current version of Android allows for. We saw some CES previews this week of a version of Android (dubbed Honeycomb) that is optimized for tablets and it looks quite impressive, but remember that by the time it comes to market, Apple will already be coming to market with the second version of the iPad.
Marketers should look very carefully at the new tablets and operating systems coming down the line this year. In this particular market segment, Apple will remain the leader through 2012 at the very least, but that doesn’t mean that brands should not consider Android and even BlackBerry tablets.
It’s also worthwhile to consider working with the larger digital platforms such as Amazon and Google, which are expanding their media presence (Amazon with music and video and Google with music and video through YouTube). There is a way that you could work through companies like these that serve as distribution partners.
Question: What is the most important thing for marketers to understand about tablets during this “year of the tablet”?
Answer: The tablet is a different kind of device—a hybrid of mobile and computing. One of the things to watch is the extent to which people are using tablets as communication devices as well as media distribution devices: Some of the recently introduced Android tablets include video-chatting capabilities, and the second-generation iPad is expected to carry these as well.
Of course it’s unlikely that people will do away with their phones right away. But one of the things this trend dovetails with is that people are using their phones less and less as phones—especially younger people. It changes our idea of what a phone is—sometimes a phone more important for its computer-like functions than phone-like functions. And as enterprise interest in tablets grows, it will be interesting to see the opportunities for tablets as a work utility and for communication purposes.
Question: Will there be offices with iPads on the desks instead of landlines and PCs?
Answer: I don’t think tablets will take the place of PCs just yet. But as the enterprise suites become more robust, they make tablets more viable for business users. The enterprise is one area that tablets lag behind laptops and netbooks, but again, we can look to the growth of smartphones to see what we can expect with tablets.
The iPhone was introduced as a consumer device, but because of its appeal, people in enterprises demanded iPhones from their IT departments. So Apple backed its way into the business market, and started to penetrate areas that were traditionally the province of BlackBerry and Microsoft. We will see a similar trend in the tablet market this year.
