Low price is not the king! The more saturated the market, the better the iphone sells.

Asymco, a market research firm, reported in Tuesday that seven years after Apple first launched its iphone smartphone, the penetration rate of smartphones in the US market has reached 70% today. The smartphone has existed before the iphone was born, so the product category has a history of more than seven years, but nonetheless, its penetration rate is still at its highest level in a variety of product categories. Seven years after the launch of the CD player, the product's penetration rate in the US market is only 55%, and the penetration rate for large hand-held recorders is only about 62% after seven years of first entry into the market. If the market penetration rate from 9% to 90% of the time, then the smartphone in the U.S. market life cycle will be about 9 years, the starting time is 2008 years. Before this time, the product was basically in the experimental stage, when most of the manufacturers involved in the market failed, and after that, most of the products would become commercialized, their margins would fall and market integration would increase. The rate of penetration is calculated at the level of the individual consumer rather than the family, so the rapid growth in smartphone penetration is more impressive. Based on this calculation, the smartphone has a total user base of more than 270 million, while consumer technology products typically target 115 million, which means that consumers have a nearly 60% more smartphone purchases than other consumer technology products. In addition, smartphone products have a shorter life cycle (only about two years), while other consumer technology products typically have a longer life cycle. This means that the US market is now in the late majority (Late majority) phase of smartphones, which is not surprising. The turning point in the US smartphone market took place in the middle of 2012, which has been going on for exactly two years. That is why the forecast of a continued slowdown in the market's growth over the next two years is irrefutable. The U.S. smartphone market penetration (Tencent technology map) as Jeffrey Moore Geoffrey Moore, the godfather of Silicon Valley and the father of High-tech marketing magic, explains, the marketing approach needs to change as technology products enter different market stages. For innovators (the first 2.5% users of a product), products need to rely on their novelty to attract these users; identity and uniqueness are the focus of attention for early adopters (then the 13.5% users of a product); early majority (and then 34% Want to get people's approval, and the laggards (the last 16%) want security. One aspect of this adoption cycle is often misunderstood: the role that product pricing plays in marketing strategies. One would take it for granted that, as adoption rates rise, the importance of product pricing becomes more and more important, but in practice it is a misconception because pricing has alwaysis important, and because of this it becomes ever more important. Pricing is one of the many elements of a marketing strategy, with products that span a wide range of pricing levels at all times available for consumers to choose from. In addition, pricing is a symbol that can be confused by carefully crafted bundles and non bundled products. With regard to the importance of pricing issues, it may be useful to look at how Apple's products are priced in the late stages of the current market. As we all know, Apple's products are very firm in pricing. Average selling price of Apple devices such as the iphone and ipad (Tencent Tech) even in today's market, the unit prices of Apple Macs, ipod music players, iphone smartphones and ipad tablets remain stubbornly consistent. This is not to say that every product is sold at the same price. By modifying the mix of low-end, midrange, and high-end products, Apple keeps the average selling price at a constant level, which means that the company can keep its profit margins regardless of the market phase. So what will Apple do in the last two-year growth stages of smartphones in the US market? From the weak market development signal, the performance of Apple in this time period will be quite good. Two sets of data provide clues to this trend: the number of new smartphone users to use each month, and the contrast between this data and the growth trend in iphone or Android phone usage. The contrast between the iphone and Android growth (pictured above) and the monthly new number of smartphone users in the US (Tencent Technology map) shows the relationship between the overall smartphone adoption rate and the iphone adoption rate. The number of users who use smartphones for the first time can be used to measure changes in the monthly user population, while the user's preference for the iphone could be used as a measure of the difference in growth. These data suggest that there is no cognitive correlation between the adoption rate and preference for iOS or Android platforms, but further observations show that there is a cyclical increase in user growth, especially since 2012. The magnitude of this change is not small, between 300,000 users per month to far more than 1 million people. The reason for the increase in the user phase may be a new product launch, or the introduction of incentives and promotions by mobile operators. The difference in adoption rates for iOS and Android platforms is that the rule is that when the penetration peaks, the user prefers the Android phone, while the user prefers the iphone when the penetration dips to the bottom. The trend should be logical: When market saturation reaches 50%, mobile operators ' promotions attract non-consumers, rather than consumers ' preference for low-priced products. But it is also a paradox: when the market enters a late stage, the mobile operators do not take incentives to attract users, so why the iphone can still achieve goodSales performance? From the chart above, when the market penetration rate exceeds 70%, the number of users using the iphone is 1.4 million more than the number of users using the Android phone. Even in the last six months, most of the iphone's late-days have increased by 15.5 million, while Android users have increased by 14.2 million. Will the iphone perform better than Android if the promotional activities for most of the late users and laggards are reduced? The only answer to this question should be: In the past and now, low prices are not the driving force in the smartphone market. By the end of the former smartphone era, the most popular voice phone in the US market was RAZR, a high-priced handset. Snow）