The question that often arises from startup, mainly concerned with their mobile strategy: to develop for the smartphone or feature phone? Which one is more popular, which one is more favorable, and on which should be more focused about?
The answer to this question lies in your own hands, a combination of the target audience, customer value, marketing plans, economic class, buying power and pricing strategy of your product. This certainly must be established first before you have to set priorities between smartphones and feature-phones, choose the wrong strategy means you can invite unwanted user segment and of course the result will not be as expected.
So, what is the difference between smartphone’s and feature phone’s market for a startup?
Smartphone, a portable device that can do many things ranging from just a phone/sms function, browsing, apps, games and many other activities. Currently the global arena is dominated by several large players such as Apple’s iOS and Android, in Indonesia itself, Android begins to grow rapidly backed up by big players such as Samsung, HTC, LG and other companies who are also started to release Android-based tablets.
The marketing target itself is still considerably segmented, only in big cities in Java and Sumatra of middle and upper economic classes. In Jakarta alone Android users started to rise in number, while iPhone and iPad users although not as fast as Android’s, is still growing constantly in upper-class society. Smartphones and tablet pc user’s type is still can be said to be an early adopters, who likes to try something new, dynamic and modern. Buying power is definitely there, although this market groups tend to be picky when paying a smartphone/web-based service.
Feature phone although may still being underestimated by the industry, its market share is tremendous. One of the feature phone handset manufacturers, Nexian even claimed to have owned 25% of mobile phones’ market share in Indonesia. In Jakarta alone it may not be too many consumers are using feature phones, but in rural areas outside of Jakarta and other major cities, the number of feature phone users is tremendous. The strength of middle economic level of course limits the price range of mobile phones they buy, but these groups tend to be more impulsive in making purchase of mobile services such as ringtones, RBT, wallpapers, SMS-based services. Billions of dollars business per month that many Indonesian startups ignored.
Well, that’s a rough comparison of the smartphone and feature phone market. Currently, the existing technology enabled in a feature phone is still limited but with the rapid technological developments, it is possible that smartphone technology could be adopted by a feature phone with a much cheaper price. This certainly can narrow down the technological gap between feature phones and smartphones, though smartphone technology must also continue to advance, but at least still be able to be pursued by Indonesian startups as content and service providers.
Perhaps in the end, we have to choose the priorities between smartphone and feature phone.
