Blog #9

After talking positively about the technology devices that I enjoy or have come to expect as a part of my life, I picked up a New York Times newspaper the other day and wa la, an article about cell phones was in the Business Day section.

This article, Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip: Plumbing the Consumer’s Psyche to Come up with the Next Hit for some reason intrigued me. The article began with how LG Electronics asks their focus groups to keep a journal and to jot down their feelings about cell phone features they like the most. The term focus group pulled my interest in, because I have been studying about library evaluation, survey’s and focus groups in my Library Evaluation Class this semester.

As I read further into the article, I noted several points of interest that I thought I would share with you. According to Ehtisham Rabbani, LG’s vice president, their job is to be behaviorists and psychologists. Executives and industry analysts say it has become important to understand the psyche of consumers and why they pick one phone over another. The cell phone market, like fashion and entertainment, is hit-driven, and if a new cell phone model does not “fly” off the shelves within weeks of its debut, it is considered a dud. The most interesting part of the article indicated that the most gadget-conscious shoppers buy a new phone every nine months, twice as fast as they did a few years ago. In addition, the Razr phone that all of us just have to have because that is the “in” thing, according to the article that is outdated and the fortunes that it made for Motorola have tumbled.

The article went on to mention that the speed of innovation makes it harder for companies to compete. Ten years ago, the wireless carriers and mobile phone makers could thrive by offering consumers two to three new options a year. However, now with nearly 80% of Americans owning a cell phone, the companies are forced to give consumers what they want even before they know they want it.

One last thing that was of interest, Nokia’s designers and researchers became fixated on the notion that the company makes 16 mobile phones a second and that many of them end up in the garbage heap. Therefore, they have shifted their thinking from examining the personalization of phones to understanding how to make a more environmentally sound product. Nokia will be introducing the Remade this month. This is a prototype of a mobile phone made entirely out of recycled aluminum cans, old tires and plastic soda bottles. It also will have a more efficient battery.

So there you have it, we are now going to even have the option to “go green” when we talk to people in their environmentally green cars such as the Prius’s.

The article that I used for this blog was from The New York Times, February 29, 2008. Section C.
Talk to you soon.