The Engagement Paradox

A trend is starting to emerge and it's one worth watching, as it speaks directly to demand creation.  It is interesting as it reflects a paradox, in how we assume behaviours across markets.  Specifically, this rears up in the mobile marketplace, but the trend is worth considering in other ways too.

The foundational piece of information that matters in this case is that the iOS platforms (Apple devices) and the Android platforms (Google's OS powering lots of hardware) are no longer even as we look at use in the US.  Android has approximately 62M phone devices and Apple's phones are used by about 40M people. These figures are from Comscore and are good estimates.  So, you'd think that all things being equal, the traffic generated from Android based operating system devices should be 1.5x that of what we see coming from Apple.  You'd think.

What we saw on Black Friday and tracked courtesy of IBM, was that the demand created on mobile platforms increased this year over last.  This "channel" of online sales increased to 24% of total demand.  Impressive, but frankly explainable by greater mobile platform proliferation across society.  All the millions of devices we hear about being sold on various launch weekends have to be used somewhere.

If we dive into the figures on just mobile shopping, a bizarre trend starts to appear.  Of the demand created, you'd think from device deployment, that the Android universe ought to be responsible for 60% of the mobile shopping, but in fact it's only 21%. The Apple world is responsible for 77% of the demand.  And while both platforms grew in their share of online shopping this year (over last), Android grew at a factor of 3.4 and Apple's iOS devices grew at a 4.8 factor. So the paradox isn't getting smaller, it's actually growing.   Let me say this another way - Apple's engagement on their devices is 3-4X that of Android engagement, and seems to be increasing.

The paradox here if I spell it out is that the devices themselves do similar things, and are aimed at roughly the same segment in society, so we should be seeing equal traction.  Historically, iOS devices have always used up more bandwidth (mobile & wifi) than Android did, but that was partially explained away by Apple having a deeper App library.  It appears however there was something else going here all along.

It seems at face value that the user is either not as engaged to shop/create demand on an Android device; or the user profile of those purchasing Android based devices is fundamentally different than was previously thought.  For what it's worth, this does apply to more than just phones, iPad was the device that 'owned' Black Friday according to IBM. It alone was 10% of all online shopping, more than any single other device, and had 88.3% of the tablet traffic.  Android's "as-good-as-an-iPad" device the Samsung Galaxy was the top Android device at 1.8% of tablet traffic.  This is one of the reasons I'm referring to the OS - operating system, rather than device platform, as the trend we're seeing is OS dependent.

There's lots of other wonderful little nuggets in the IBM report, such as the lack of impact of Facebook and Twitter.  Enjoy the read.

What does this all mean ?  A few things I think.  It means an assumption was made, that wasn't true.  It means we're all individuals in how we elect to engage, and it means that our world is becoming more transparent that we can know this almost as soon as it happens.