One of the great sales questions of all time is: can you get people to pay for something that they usually get for free?
Bottled water companies do it. WSJ.com does it. Microsoft does it. And so does Playphone, as well as our competitors in the mobile marketing arena.
The Cassandras of this world always argue that businesses that give away their products for free are constantly under threat.
Conversely, entrepreneurs will see the opportunities. And that is just how Playphone sees the rise of the smartphone, and the huge market for free apps that has developed in the short time since Apple launched its iPhone to the world.
The iPhone is fantastic news for marketers, gadget fans and for content companies. Thousand of free apps, developed by whoever wants to develop them, are suddenly available, as well as paid-for games. This has served to grow the number of people who see their handsets as entertainment devices, and take it well beyond the youth market to a much wider audience.
So where are the opportunities for mobile content providers when so many excellent apps are free? Well, much of this new audience doesn’t have the time or interest in browsing through thousands of free apps to find something cool and fun. This is where the paid-for sector comes in, offering users content based on brands, celebrities, top quality entertainment – the stuff that they are happy to pay to see in a cinema, or on DVD.
It’s worth making a comparison with digital music. If you were willing to spend an afternoon trawling MySpace Music and had the right software, you could download hundreds of free tracks legally.
But as we are all starting to realise, the art isn’t offering free stuff. It’s providing a trustworthy source of editing. And that is something that companies like PlayPhone offer consumers.
It helps that the iPhone does not look set to dominate the smartphone market in the way that the iPod has dominated the MP3 space. Thanks to the Blackberry Storm, T-Mobile G1 and others, there is going to be a huge market for content that works on other platforms.
From PlayPhone’s point of view, we think that build a product offering around branded content through premium mobile destinations will also induce consumers to pay for mobile entertainment.
By end of 2009 PlayPhone hopes to deliver content to one billion mobile users globally, while operating 100 premium mobile destinations. Within five years, we hope to become the largest digital D2C specialist.
Pretty optimistic thinking for a company selling something that people can, ostensibly, get for nothing.
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