Wonder why the marketing world is seemingly obsessed with creating apps for the iPhone? Then, take a stroll down the halls of Kraft Foods, Gannett and others who are jumping on the bandwagon. You’ll see a sea of iPhones as the brand makes serious incursions on RIM’s BlackBerry stronghold, the once acknowledged smartphone of choice for corporate America.
In a conference call with Apple Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook said about 20% of Fortune 100 companies have purchased a total of 10,000 or more iPhones since the handset’s release in 2007, and scores of government agencies and businesses have each purchased more than 25,000 iPhones for their organizations. In many ways, the iconic iPhone is sneaking through the marketers’ corporate back door: Consumers fall for it and decide they want to use it as their business phone, too. The handset’s popularity among corporate smartphone users and its support of the Microsoft Exchange mail server and other enterprise requirements have forced more and more IT departments to support them, landing the iPhone on the list of company-sanctioned phones.
Marketing people who are iPhone enthusiasts are likely to push apps. At Kraft, employees share iPhone best practices, favorite applications and company ringtones. As to be expected at a company that has crafted a much-buzzed-about iPhone application, the iFood Assistant shopping and recipe utility, there’s also a repository of ideas for new-iPhone-application development.
More than 4.500 employees, or about 5% of Kraft’s staff, have iPhones that were party underwritten by the company’s stipend program, which gives eligible employees $100 toward any personal digital assistant they choose. That means Kraft would have to sell more than 450,000 copies of its .99 iFood app to recoup the iPhone stipend. Kraft declined to say how many times iFood has been downloaded, but it is among the top 20 paid apps in the lifestyle section of the App Store.
According to Kraft, the iPhone delivers intangible benefits beyond the productivity gains the company is looking to reap by partially paying for employees’ PDAs. “As a consumer-goods company, we want to be at the forefront in innovation and offering what our consumers are looking for,” said DAvid Diedrich, Kraft’s VP-Information Systems. “Providing our employees with the same tools our consumers have enables us to better engage with them.”
In a nutshell, Apple is making gains on RIM. Worldwide, its share of the smartphone market jumped to 13% last quarter, up from 3% a year ago, according to Gartner. RIM’s global smartphone share last quarter edged up to 19% from 17% a year ago. With a 3% share of the corporate installed base as of last year, the iPhone, however, despite its early success in the corporate world, still has a ways to go in unseating BlackBerry as the dominant enterprise phone. Primarily because the handset remains dogged by the perception that it lacks BlackBerry’s bullet-proof security.
Still… the marketing mayhem continues…
excerpted from Rita Chang’s article in August 24, 2009 issue of Advertising Age
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