There is much buzz surrounding the announcement that the iPhone will be available to Verizon subscribers as Apple ends its exclusive carrier agreement with AT&T. The deal is expected to shakeup the mobile marketplace as consumers who are either current iPhone subscribers or in the market for one now have the option of choosing a carrier, a choice expected to drive a growing number of mobile users into Verizon’s subscriber base and further increase iPhone device sales.

Verizon currently leads the U.S. mobile market as the carrier for 31% of mobile subscribers, with AT&T accounting for 27% share. But when looking exclusively at the smartphone market, AT&T holds a commanding lead with 38% marketshare, compared to Verizon’s 27%. However, as an increasing number of smartphone options have become available across carriers, AT&T has seen its smartphone share decline 7 percentage points in the past year. Meanwhile, Verizon has climbed 4 percentage points as Android devices using Verizon have penetrated the market at a rapid clip.

Is a Platform Market Share Shakeup on the Horizon?
As Apple ends its exclusive deal with AT&T, it is facing an increasingly competitive smartphone environment as new devices flood the marketplace, highlighted by the rising number of Android devices hitting store shelves. In the past year, Android has risen from minimal penetration to now holding a solid 26% of the smartphone market, putting it slightly ahead of Apple’s 25% share but still behind platform leader RIM, which held 33.5% of the market in comScore’s latest mobile benchmarker. Throughout the year iPhone has seen its penetration remain relatively unchanged, hovering at 25% share throughout the year. (It should be noted that the iPhone’s installed base has certainly grown, but its share of the market has remained more or less stable.) The iPhone Verizon deal will no doubt bring even greater competition to the smartphone arena throughout the coming year as Android, iPhone and RIM jockey for the leadership position.

iPhone Users Represent Attractive Subscribers for Verizon
If iPhone users decide to make the carrier leap and switch from AT&T to Verizon, it is likely that Verizon will gain subscribers that represent attractive brand consumers. iPhone users heavily over index in some of the most attractive age segments – 25-34 year olds (index of 175), 18-24 year olds (index of 141) and 35-44 year olds (index of 129) and are 22 percent more likely than an average mobile subscriber to be male. iPhone users often represent higher income brackets, with 81% of users having a household income of at least $50k and 47% of users reporting a household income of at least $100k.

iPhone users have also displayed loyalty to the Apple brand (and consequently to AT&T) with more than half of users having a subscription for more than three years (54.6%) and 28.2% of subscribers holding their subscription for 1-3 years.

Although it’s too early to tell exactly how consumers will react to the Verizon iPhone announcement, it is fair to say that this deal represents a potentially significant turning point in the ascendance of the smartphone market. Only time will tell which carriers and platforms will emerge as the market leaders, but it’s clear that right now the consumers are winners as they gain yet another option when making their smartphone choice.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on December 21, 2010.

Tis the season for holiday shopping, and across the globe more people are turning to the Internet to make their purchases – particularly in the retail sector. E-commerce is traditionally led by travel transactions and purchases, but towards the end of the year in the U.S., retail e-commerce picks up. E-commerce can equal big bucks – take for instance the recent record the U.S. hit in holiday spending when the country experienced its first day on record of achieving more than $1 billion (USD) in e-commerce sales on a single day during Cyber Monday (November 29). This highlights the opportunity the digital channel holds for retailers.

In Asia Pacific, visitation to retail sites has achieved a much higher market penetration than travel – which tends to be the gateway and primary category in online purchasing. In most markets, more than half of Internet users frequented a retail destination in October, while in most cases less than half frequented a travel site. Looking at which markets were most retail savvy, Japan topped the list with 80 percent of its online population visiting a retail site in October, followed by Australia (76 percent) and South Korea (72 percent). Singapore achieved the highest percent penetration for travel with 52 percent reach, followed by New Zealand and Australia at 48 percent and 43 percent; these markets have retail penetration rates of 64 percent and up. It’s interesting to note that just because a market exhibits high propensity for utilising retail sites, does not necessarily mean they are as willingly to frequent travel sites, with large differences in these two activities seen in several markets including Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

Local and Global Brands Attempt to Win Consumers’ Loyalty and Dollars

When consumers turn to the digital channel to purchase retail goods or travel, global and local brands are often pitted against each other to fight for the attention and dollars of visitors. A look at the top destinations on a regional basis paints a mixed picture with Asian-based companies and multi-nationals finding nearly equal popularity with consumers. Alibaba.com Corporation was the clear retail leader with nearly 120 million visitors from the Asia Pacific region; its flagship taobao.com retail site accounted for 108 million visitors in the region. Alibaba.com is also ranked as the second largest global online retailer after Amazon. U.S.-based Amazon and Apple followed as number two and number three, while local players such as Rakuten.co.jp, Paipai.com, and Zol.com.cn all secured places in the top 10 listing.

In Consuming Retail Content – Females Take the Prize

In most markets across the region, women were more likely to consume content at retail sites than men, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan showing strong disparity in page consumption. On the flip side, Vietnam and the Philippines showed males much more likely to consume pages of retail content than females. For brands looking to develop engaging content on their sites, understanding viewers from a demographic and behavioural standpoint is critically important.

The Future of E-Commerce: A Promising Outlook

At this point, e-commerce revenues in Asia Pacific are still not comparable to the Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, but increasing traffic to retail sites means more shopping, which will result in more buying – online or offline. The e-commerce channel holds incredible potential for brands and retailers across the region and for some markets in particular. For brands attempting to access and capitalise on the online channel as a way to reach consumers and their wallets, it’s important to remember several things when building your digital commerce strategy:

• Know your target audience and where to find them: Understanding who your key audiences are, including their demographic characteristics, what online sites and categories they visit, and what digital content they spend time consuming, will help you reach and engage your audience more effectively, especially for smaller or less-known brands.
• Create a secure environment: In many markets, consumers still face a lack of confidence in conducting secure transactions online. Developing a secure environment and providing consumers with transparency in your purchasing policies can help build trust in the channel and make the differences if a consumer buys from you or your competitor.
• Online presence can equal offline sales: It’s important to remember that not all people will buy online, but many will in fact research and browse online and make the actual purchase offline. So even if you don’t plan to sell your goods digitally, having a digital brand presence is increasingly important to savvy shoppers.
• The payment gateway is key: Credit cards are not “King” in many markets in Asia Pacific for e-commerce, because not everyone has one (or two). Alibaba.com has Alipay to connect to banking debit accounts and is one of the main reasons for its success. Other markets are following a similar debit rather than credit route.

E-commerce in Asia Pacific is growing as our company also highlighted in a recent press release that the U.S.-focused Cyber Monday also attracted a lot of international shoppers. Nearly 6 percent of the billion dollar hoard on that day came from people living outside of the U.S., but shopping at U.S. websites. This is a consistent 6 percent trend that also occurred last year in 2009 – but last year’s 6 percent was out of $887 million whereas this year’s 6 percent was out of $1.028 billion…and I, for one, did my part and bought online from U.S. retailers on Cyber Monday.

This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on January 10, 2011.

Food is big business, maybe the biggest. I can't think of a more routinely asked question than "What should we eat?"

Thankfully we now have technology - namely search - to help us answer that question so we don't hurt our brains thinking too hard. Although we've probably all used the Internet to help us find a local restaurant or order a pizza, the vast majority of our eating is done inside the home and the food is procured the old fashioned way - from a visit to your local grocery store.

Impulse decisions aside, grocery shoppers tend to be an informed (and often thrifty) bunch who turn to the Internet in increasing numbers to research and prep for their trip to the store. comScore's latest search data sheds some light on how consumers and manufacturers are making the most of search with this ubiquitous consumer behavior.

Just how important is search to the food industry? In the fourth quarter of 2010, food related websites attracted nearly 400 million visits from U.S. internet users via search, a number that has grown 22 percent in the past year and shows no signs in slowing down as more opportunities to "play with your food" become available online.

Paid Search for "Recipes" is Huge

Far and away the most prevalent interest in all of online food searching is the quest for "recipes." U.S. Internet searchers ran more than 150 million "recipe" related searches in Q4 (with chicken recipes consistently leading the way).

Savvy marketers are well aware of this fact and are investing heavily in attracting these consumers via paid search, serving nearly 1 billion paid search ads to recipe searchers during that same time period.

Three of the largest paid search food marketers - Kraft, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury - use search to drive traffic to their branded websites, which offer a variety of recipes and cooking ideas.

This paid search investment helps these big brand marketers drive brand engagement in order to ensure their products remain top of mind during their customers' next shopping trip. While these branding paid search dollars most certainly are being invested, we shouldn't neglect those direct response opportunities either.

Online Ordering via Search

Many local grocery stores have begun to allow online ordering -- if not for an entire set of groceries, certainly for specialty items during high traffic times throughout the year. (More than 5 million "ham" searches had been conducted by late holiday season).

Because my family listens to me at least some of the time, they are savvy enough to take advantage of these emerging technology trends and found the new local grocery store that accepted online ham orders, via search, reserving our delicious bounty. Search was just the start of this online ordering process, but leads directly into deeper analysis food merchants must consider.

The Ham Wars: Search Lessons for Merchants

The importance of online ordering (and ensuing execution) became quite apparent to me as my mother sent me to the store to pick up our honey-baked ham for Christmas dinner. I had a pre-scheduled time for pick up, an order number already in hand, and it should have been simple.

But an orderly system will break down if not enough people utilize it. Based upon the chaos that followed at the deli counter (an event to which I now affectionately refer to as "The Ham Wars") you would have thought we were all vying for spots on the lifeboat of the Titanic. Elbows were flying as we each made our move for the best ham.

As a grocery retailer, these are the types of events that can be anticipated. If online ordering is offered, retailers must effectively process those customers in an orderly and timely fashion.

Although my experience was an example of a retailer watching the online trends and trying to be ahead of the curve, all goodwill engendered by such an effort can be lost when the in-store experience doesn't match the convenience and efficiency of an online order. Let's not lose sight of the fact that these decisions are all part of a greater supply chain and customer experience plan that must be taken into consideration before implementation.

Search got me through the door, but the Ham Wars almost prevented me from making it out alive. There is plenty of opportunity for food manufacturers and retailers to acquire customers online, but they'll need to consider the logistics further down the purchase funnel if they intend to keep them.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on January 19, 2011.

As a working professional, I spend about 30% of my time reading and writing emails. Outside of work, I find that I am spending less and less time in front of a computer on personal emails. As digital communication continues to evolve so too have consumers’ behaviors. Web-based email, which for many years was on a continual growth curve, is now seeing declining usage across many geographies throughout the globe as consumers are offered a growing number vehicles to digitally communicate.

Globally, total minutes spent on web-based email (note this does not include PC web applications such as Outlook) was down 2 percent in November 2010 versus November 2009, with time spent in the Asia-Pacific region showing even more dramatic decline dropping 10 percent. Within the region, markets showed varying levels of engagement trends. The largest decline in time spent was seen in Malaysia (down 22 percent), India (down 19 percent) and South Korea (down 15 percent). Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand on the other hand actually showed increases in overall minutes spent in the category.

What or Who is Driving the Web-Based Email Exodus?

When looking for the email declining culprit look no further than the demo segments that usually begin online trends – young users. Analysis across the market showed that younger users most often exhibit the strongest change in email behavior, driving down overall category engagement. A look at Malaysia for instance revealed that although there are more unique Internet visitors across all age segments, young users are showing the strongest decline in email visitation. Visitors age 15-24 visited web-based emails 16 percent fewer instances than a year ago, while those ages 25-34 declined 7 percent. Even persons age 35-44 experienced a 6-percent decrease in visitation to email sites. Older demographic segments saw more users visit email destinations with those 55+ growing 14 percent, as once again age marks a major difference in consumption patterns.

We now know web-based email isn’t capturing the same level of engagement and visitation it used to in many markets, and it is obviously not because we communicate less with each other. Humans are now more connected that ever before. The question is where and how are people communicating digitally? There are a few key trends to consider here in the evolution of digital communication, but the most important are social networking and mobile.

As social networking has reached a critical mass across most of Asia Pacific (52 percent reach), communicating via wall posts, messages, tweets etc. has often replaced the need for regular emailing in some peoples’ digital lives. Time spent on social networking sites in November 2010 grew 44 percent worldwide to reach a total of 272 billion minutes, in Asia-Pacific total minutes spent social networking climbed 16 percent. Across the region, every market except mobile-obsessed Japan experienced double-digital growth in minutes spent social networking on the computer; Malaysia - the market that witnessed the greatest decline of time spent on web-based email - experienced the greatest increase in social networking minutes – up 114 percent!

Another theory on the decline of web-based email usage: people are turning to their mobile devices to email and communicate. In the U.S. for instance (which has also seen the web-based email declining phenomenon), mobile email usage has grown 36 percent in the past year. In Europe, mobile email users grew 55 percent in the past year. In Japan, 53 percent of users access email via their mobile in September leading as one of the top mobile behaviors in the market. Whether for work or personal email use, mobile offers the convenience of staying in the loop no matter where you are, and for some couch potatoes sitting at home, it offers a quicker way to check your inbox even when there is a PC at your disposal. Let’s not forget the approximately 9 million iPads that have been sold and gives you apps for accessing your mails. With the tablet market set to explode this year, this is yet another device that supplants web-mail usage.

So what does this mean for marketers?

1. Email is still important, don’t take this as the sign to stop all together using the email channel to reach your audience. Targeted, permission-based email will remain one of the best ways to reach your existing and potential customers.
2. Web-based email remains engaging. No one is going to give up his/her Gmail or Hotmail account without a fight. When they read their mails, they are still going to staring at that screen longer than the average web page so they will be exposed to the ad longer.
3. Targeting and Re-Targeting. Many web-based email providers give advertisers a lot of information about the users that can be used to target advertising. In addition, if you are doing a branding campaign where frequency is important, you will have greater confidence that your message is reaching the same audience. People are not going to change email addresses every month.

It’s not that people are communicating less and that is why email usage is declining - they are actually communicating more but just through an increasing amount of channels. So the era of email isn’t over per se, it’s just evolving as all communication channels have throughout history. The digital landscape just makes those changes happen a lot more quickly, and distinct communication channels will become blurred. Google launched Buzz last year to try to integrate social into email. Coming from the other way, Facebook recently offered email accounts. The term “email” will soon become as outdated as the “telex”.