A study published by Harris Interactive found that when it comes to mobile phones, Apple is the #5 brand among consumers, despite all the hype around the iPhone. Apple trailed Motorola, HTC, SonyEricsson, and Nokia in the ranking. In computers, Apple came out the as the #2 brand, behind HP and ahead of Dell, despite the Mac’s relatively small (but growing) share of the PC market.
In the chart below, you can see that Motorola lead the field in mobile phones. The numbers in the chart don’t represent percentages, but rather scores based on polling some 25,099 U.S. consumers ages 15 and over between January 11 through January 27, 2011. Harris said that a total of 1,273 brands were rated in 53 separate categories, and the data was then weighted to be representative of the entire U.S. population.
Source: Harris Interactive
The mobile phone brand ranking includes all handsets, and not just smartphones. Where Apple is a big player in the smartphone business, that smartphone business is still a small part of the overall mobile phone market. In other words, there are many more Motorola, HTC, SonyErricsson, and Nokia mobile phones being used than there are iPhones, and that apparently matters when it comes to brand awareness.
“Apple may have the market cornered on technology enthusiasts, but Motorola satisfies a much wider audience,” Jeni Lee Chapman, Executive Vice President of Brand and Communications Consulting with Harris Interactive, said in a statement. “There is still a large audience of consumers that aren’t interested in a smartphone running their life, and Apple doesn’t have a product to meet that need.”
Confrontational language aside, it’s a testament to Apple’s marketing prowess that its ranking was so close to the three bands above the company considering its niche-status in the overall mobile phone market.
That marketing prowess also threw its weight around in Harris’s computer hardware brand ranking, where Apple was #2, closely behind #1 HP. As you can see in the chart below, Apple was well ahead of #3 Dell, even though Dell sells many times more computers than Apple sells Macs. Harris didn’t offer any commentary on the computer hardware rankings.
Source: Harris Intteractive