Last week, Best Buy announced that it will begin to sell the iPhone, the still very hot new device that is exclusive to carrier AT&T, on September 7th.

Best Buy has been selling mobile phones and plans for some time now, and they have made a considerable investment in building their presence with a “store within a store” concept. This announcement made me wonder about how much traction Best Buy could actually get from selling the iPhone.

The chart shows the percentage of people who visited both the wireless section of Best Buy’s website and a major US carrier site in the same month. Are consumers already cross-shopping between Best Buy and AT&T? The short answer is some do, but not a lot - at least not yet.

• In the last year, an average of 11% of Best Buy wireless shoppers have also gone to AT&T each month.
• Cross shop between Best Buy’s wireless section and Sprint has historically been low compared to AT&T and Verizon. However cross-shop this July, since the launch of the Instinct (also sold at Best Buy), has nearly doubled.

What might this mean for Best Buy and AT&T come September 7th? Sprint’s Instinct has generated a lot of buzz and interest in the market, but it’s nowhere near the headliner that the iPhone is. If that one trend holds true, we could see a substantial increase in shared traffic between AT&T and Best Buy.

Offline, Best Buy’s retail dominance gives a more diverse group of consumers more opportunities to see and experience the much hyped iPhone in person in the bricks-and-mortar stores.

Even if those Best Buy consumers ultimately buy the iPhone from more specialized reps at the Apple Store or AT&T, more people spending more time with Best Buy could bring the retailer more sales in iPhone accessories and other products as we lead into the crucial back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons.

Have you noticed lately how many microsites (sites designated for a specific type of content) are dedicated to cell phones? Manufacturers are getting the “bug” and creating interactive microsites to market their hot new phones. Some of the biggest cell phone releases of late have been tied with the hyped summer movies: namely Iron Man and Batman: The Dark Knight. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here!)

Microsites are certainly not a new thing in the cell phone marketing world, but by linking them to a big-name movie, did LG and Nokia get more bang for their microsite buck?

LG got its hands on Iron Man; in the beginning scenes of the movie, you’ll see an LG VX9400 prominently featured in the hands of Tony Stark. Their microsite, insidethesuit.com, incorporates images from the movie – visitors look at 3 of LG’s latest new phones and check out mobile content from inside the Iron Man suit.

Nokia, meanwhile, synced up with Batman and the release of The Dark Knight for the debut of their “batphone” – Nokia 6205 – The Dark Knight Edition. Their movie-based microsite, fightforgothamcity.com, allows the user to choose a side (Batman or The Joker), then navigate through the streets of Gotham City looking at the new “batphone” and all of the Batman-themed mobile content and games designed for Nokia phones.

I got to thinking about how these microsites actually work for the OEMs who use them.

I took a look at the unique visitor traffic to each site over the past few months. Traffic started to show up for insidethesuit.com in April, and peaked during May, the month that Iron Man was released. Meanwhile, fightforgothamcity.com started seeing traffic in June, when the site went up, corresponding to The Dark Knight premiere. However it peaks in July probably because the movie was released closer to the end of June. I’m curious to see in the coming months whether fightforgothamcity.com will also lose almost all of its traffic after a two month run.

I also took a look at the time users spend (on average) on each microsite, compared to when the movie opened.

As expected, hype seems to play a role in driving people to spend time on these sites. The peak in time spent on site occurs right around the opening weekend when advertising, reviews, and buzz is greatest. A couple of interesting points:

• The time spent on fightforgothamcity.com actually went up in July after the release of the movie.
• In the case of insidethesuit.com, the average time spent per user is relatively steady in June, even though the count of unique visitors drops to almost zero. But that average time spent drops off in July, as the hype around Iron Man waned. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens on fightforgothamcity.com in August.

Is a movie-themed microsite the way to go from now on? To figure that out, you really need to compare these two campaigns with other, more traditional microsites we’ve seen in the past year. I took a look at two others, each centered on a phone that was popular when it launched: palmcentro.com and samsungjuke.com. I decided to look at the percentage of total OEM traffic that each microsite saw in a given month to see if the insidethesuit.com and fightforgothamcity.com were successful in getting more traffic to their microsites than a more traditional microsite.

Though both movie-based microsites saw a better share of their respective OEM’s traffic than palmcentro.com, neither insidethesuit.com nor fightforgothamcity.com did any better than samsungjuke.com at attracting traffic to their respective sites. Samsungjuke.com actually did better than insidethesuit.com at the peak of its traffic. It seems the movie link has no significant effect on the traffic to a microsite.

Curious if the movie link has any effect on microsites, I took a look at the average time spent per visitor to palmcentro.com and samsungjuke.com.

It’s clear that this is where palmcentro.com and samsungjuke.com differ from insidethesuit.com and fightforgothamcity.com. On both palmcentro.com and samsungjuke.com, the launch of the phone sometimes has an effect on the engagement of its visitors, but this effect is short-lived at best. The movie-based sites saw much more sustained engagement, showing that the movie-based content is keeping visitors at the site for longer, and thus giving LG and Nokia a longer timeframe in which to expose visitors to their brand and product. So if engagement is what OEMs are looking for by designing these microsites, it appears they should start thinking about campaigns for the summer 2009 movie premiers. Popcorn anyone?

When people are looking at wireless phones, the carriers’ sites play a crucial role in the research and shopping process, but manufacturers’ web presence is playing an increasingly important role. The number of people who visited their sites every month is one indicator of an OEM’s popularity relative to competitors’.

In June, traffic to Motorola’s universe of sites (shown here in pink) was exceeded for the first time by not one, but two other OEMs’. Both RIM (in purple) and Samsung (in red) have been drawing significantly more people to their sites since the beginning of the year, as we can see in the chart below.

These numbers represent more than just traffic to the manufacturers’ domains. That you can see at compete.com. In this post we’re looking at traffic to a universe of sites belonging to the manufacturer, which is a better gauge of consumer interest in mobile phones overall by that manufacturer. Differences from compete.com include:

• Only the US mobile phones portion of each OEM site is included, to exclude visitors to other products the manufacturer produces
• OEM microsites dedicated to specific models are included, such as instinctthephone.com and blackberrybold.com

• Traffic to RIM sites increased sharply, perhaps thanks to their extensive brand-focused advertising campaigns, including “Life on Blackberry,” and announcements of their new Bold and Thunder models
• Traffic to Samsung increased mainly due to the buzz around the launch of the Instinct at Sprint, and the Glyde at Verizon
• Meanwhile, traffic to Palm, Nokia, and LG have been trending upwards or holding steady

On the one hand, this shift could be a symptom of Motorola’s recent financial and product-related struggles, as consumers increasingly turn to high-profile products at other OEMs.

On the other hand, June marked a substantial increase in traffic to Motorola to the tune of over 175,000 people more than in May, more than the total traffic to LG or Sony Ericsson last month. The overall trend in traffic is upward. Motorola might be one attention grabbing product away from reclaiming the top spot among OEM sites.

Will Motorola make a comeback? Or will RIM and Samsung fight it out to be top dog for good? Keep watching the Compete blog to find out.

Before the iPhone was engrained in the public’s consciousness, LG and Verizon Wireless released a little music-capable phone called the Chocolate. While it didn’t cause people to abandon their iPods, it did have an attention-grabbing “slider” form factor. The Chocolate proliferated in colors (9 in total) over the last 2 years and the hardware was upgraded about a year ago, but the slider design remained the most recognizable aspect of the phone.

As consumers have expressed interest in this style, wireless carriers have increased their offering of slider-style phones. The chart below tracks consumers’ interest in slider phones weekly over the last year. The bars represent consumer interest in slider phones as a percentage of total consumer interest in all mobile phones, and the line represents the percentage of all phones on carrier websites that have that form factor.

• When interest in slider phones spiked in Q4 of 2007, consumer interest in slider phones exceeded the carrier offerings by 68%
• Carriers have paid attention to this gap and steadily increased their slider phone offerings, although consumer interest still exceeded carrier offerings by 31% in Q2 2008

All signs point to the slider market continuing to grow. However, the debut of the Chocolate 3 on July 13 marked a move away from the phone’s signature, and desirable, slider form. The Chocolate 3 is a traditional “flip” phone, albeit one with an iPod-esque spin wheel on the front.

The choice is an unusual one. Not only are slider phones gaining in popularity, but Compete’s data shows that there’s already an abundance of flip phones on the market. Below is a similar chart to the one above, depicting consumer’s interest in flip phones weekly over the last year.

• Similar to the slider chart above, consumer interest in flip phones is closely matched by carrier offerings in Q3 2007.
• Consumer interest drops off quite a bit in Q4 2007 and Q1 2008 while the carrier offerings stay largely unchanged. Consumer interest was 23% lower than carrier offerings in Q4 2007.
• In Q2 2008, consumer interest and carrier offerings draw closer, although consumer interest was still 11% lower than carrier offerings.

Let’s recap: LG releases the successful Chocolate slider. Consumers are increasingly interested in slider phones. Now, LG is planning to build on the Chocolate’s success by redesigning the Chocolate 3 to have a flip form factor. There’s an abundance of flips already on the market, and consumer interest in them has been falling…

Consumers’ interest in sliders is still growing and carriers’ portfolios aren’t loaded up with enough sliders to meet that demand yet. On the other hand, the flip design, which formerly enjoyed extreme popularity thanks to iconic phones like the RAZR, may be overrepresented in carrier portfolios.

The days of the flip being king seem to have passed, though it is worth noting that the flip is enjoying a reinvention on phones such as the Voyager and enV2. These phones hide full QWERTY keyboard for email and text messaging fans. But when the flip hides a regular numeric keypad, consumers seem to be less interested. My guess is that we’ll see the slider return to the Chocolate family if the Chocolate 3 has a weak debut.

The new Apple iPhone is coming out on July 11th, and the media buzz surrounding its launch has been a bit over-the-top. It remains to be seen if the iPhone 3G will make as big a splash as some analysts say it will, but if does there could be disruptive consequences for its competitors. So who’s the most at risk? I took a look at OEM customers’ affinity for Apple to find out.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that “affinity for Apple” equates to likelihood to visit apple.com. The chart below depicts the likelihood that owners of each company’s handsets go to apple.com. On this scale, the average Internet user would score a “1”, meaning they are no more or less likely than anybody else online to visit apple.com. In contrast, as the chart below shows, owners of each OEM’s handsets are much more likely to visit apple.com.

• All OEM owners are at least twice as likely to visit apple.com as the average Internet user. This is likely due to the tech-friendly nature of the majority of these OEMs’ user bases.
• RIM owners are over 60% more likely to visit apple.com as compared to the other three OEMs listed.

Of these four OEMs, RIM (Blackberry) seems the most at risk by Apple’s mobile presence. Keep in mind that I didn’t look at exactly what these consumers were doing on the apple.com domain, nor did I look at behavior around any particular product launches which could alter these results significantly. However, just knowing that your customers are more than 60% more likely than your competitors’ customers to behave in ANY specific way is notable. What is it about Apple that’s drawing RIM customers in?

Industry analysts are predicting that Apple, by adding business-user functionality in the iPhone 3G, and RIM, with the introduction of the Blackberry Bold later this year, are on a collision course. The data above certainly point that way. Both companies launched strong marketing campaigns this year, and both appear to be pleasing Wall Street analysts. But successful launches of both the iPhone 3G and the Blackberry Bold will almost certainly mean that each company will draw business away from the other’s customer base. Who will win this grudge match? It looks like we could find out before the end of 2008.

No one loves gadgets, cool services and devices more than I do. In fact, I have had a “one-number” service in play off and on since the early days of cellular phones, circa ’96. I think I may have just dated myself. Despite my own infatuation with the latest and greatest communications solutions, I was very surprised to learn that consumer interest in Unified Communications during much of ‘07 eclipsed interest in the very telco products/services that enable them.

Unified Communications (UC) is defined by Microsoft as technology that offers customers choices in how their communication and collaboration software is delivered, managed and maintained. UC companies such as CallWave, Inc., Microsoft, GrandCentral (Google), OneBox®, Genesys® (Alcatel-Lucent) centralize all messaging email, voicemail, SMS, fax and even video into one inbox. These messages are instantly accessible from various, user defined devices such as a computer or mobile phone. How could any mobile professional, small business owner, remote worker or field agent ignore the value add of such a service?

But does all of this spell higher interest in UC versus voice services, broadband and bundles?

The graph below illustrates online consumers’ interest in a number of UC company sites and Telco company sites. Specifically, the relative interest in UC solutions and Telco bundles from April ’07 to April ’08 was measured.

UC company consideration was on average 70% higher than Telco company consideration 2Q thru 4Q ’07 with peaks in 3Q ’07. The peak in UC interest is attributed to buzz in the marketplace among of IT professionals, marketers and procurement departments in major corporations. In fact, it has been reported that more than a quarter of all enterprises in North America and Europe now have some form of UC initiatives in play. During a briefing with CallWave, Inc. at NxtComm ‘08 recently, a representative indicated that the spike in interest about their firm was driven by the introduction of free UC widgets and increased marketing spend during 3Q ‘07. This demonstrates that lesser known companies can peak interest in new product/services with trial offerings backed by marketing dollars.

In late Q4 ’07 the trend in UC interest normalized and then ‘yielded’ to Telco interest. Despite this, Telco companies have an opportunity to leverage the UC excitement among the consumer and small business base of customers who are seeking simplified communications in their busy lives. After all, everyone gets excited about killer apps…