Research company YouGov has found that 42% of ‘standard’ mobile phone owners in the UK plan to choose a smartphone when they replace their handset. The figure is 6% up from last year.
Over half (55%) of existing ‘feature phone’ users said they weren’t moving to a smartphone because they were happy with their existing handset. Other reasons included having no need for a smartphone (47%), smartphones being too expensive (32%), the cost of smartphone tariffs (30%) and smartphones being too complicated (16%).
The majority of these standard mobile phone owners (64%) are on ‘pay as you go’ tariffs. Less than a third of them (28%) had bought their handset directly from the network operator, compared to over half (55%) of all smartphone users.
Russell Feldman, Associate Director in YouGov’s Technology and Telecom’s team, said “There is certainly an opportunity for standard mobile phone owners to take advantage of several low-end smartphones currently on the market. Manufacturers such as HTC and Samsung, as well as OEM handsets, are successful at attracting low-end smartphone users and could potentially help convert standard mobile users – especially as there is an increase of PAYG in the smartphone market. The ‘one size fits all’ approach does not work in this instance and customer service needs to be tailored to suit the requirements of the customer. The groups that are rejecting smartphones do not usually find empathetic sales staff in the retailers they frequent. This is a matter of salesforce training for operators and retailers.”