The back-to-school rush is over and, inevitably, the holidays will soon be upon us.
Cue up the chorus of young voices in your household tentatively suggesting that you might want to take them shopping for new handsets.
Hmm … just how young is that chorus, overall?
Data from iGR Research spells out an eye-opening picture.
Between 5% and 10% of five-year-olds have a mobile phone. By age 10, fully one-third of American kids have a phone. By the first teenage years, nearly 100% of America’s kids have a phone.
Tweens, thus, are the transition demographic, between childhood and adolescence, where future marketing and handset design will focus, according to Iain Gillott, principal at iGR Research.
The research and analyst firm plans to launch another tween survey to demonstrate how swiftly cellphone penetration has reached into the elementary school set. But previous surveys in 2005 and 2007 of more than 800 parents and 400 children tell a sobering story.
Peace of mind
Staying in touch has become the mantra serving both tweens and their parents, Gillott said. Except, of course, tweens want to stay in touch with each other via text messaging and parents simply want to know their tweens are safe.
“What do parents like?” Gillott asked, rhetorically. “Pure peace of mind.”
If a text enquiry to one’s tween – “R U OK?” – is returned in the affirmative, mission accomplished, the analyst said.
And with the advent of inexpensive handsets, family plans and parental control software, the cost and ease of this contact and monitoring is affordable for an increasing number of parents.
The tween’s first phone is likely to be the undesirable but (sigh!) acceptable first phone for tweens, Gillott said. But after that, new, cool handsets are increasingly demanded by the tween. Boys want the “James Bond”-like gadgets, while girls prefer fashion statements. (Of course, those preferences totally disappear in adulthood, right?)
Marketing aimed at parents emphasizes safety and peace of mind. Marketing aimed at the tween emphasizes the unalloyed joy of remaining in touch with peers.
“Market to the kids, sell to the parents,” Gillott said. “Make it easy for parents to buy the proposition – that’s where family plans come in. Brilliant!”
Price adds up
It’s typically not possible with a family plan to determine the split between voice use and text use among tweens, Gillott said, because family plan voice minutes are shared, with text-message options ladled on top. Something about the declarative, arm’s-length nature of text has made it vastly preferable for this group, the analyst acknowledged.
But the dynamic is lucrative for carriers: Parents often enlarge their bucket of minutes to avoid ugly surprises at billing time, cognizant of their tweens’ and teens’ penchant for seemingly insane levels of peer contact. In a family plan, the cost per line can often triple in the process of adding kids, Gillott said, from about $10 per line to about $35 per line.
Of course, parents also are able to exercise control over the tween or teen handset usage through various carrier offerings – and that tends to bother youngsters. But the analyst said that his surveys reveal that, if parental controls are inevitable, tweens would still prefer to be connected.
If you are wringing your hands at this point, don’t bother, the analyst suggested. For the past five decades, there have been portable consumer electronics devices preoccupying America’s youngsters. From the transistor radio of the 1960s to the cassette players of the 1970s to CD players and PCs – not to mention the perennial bogeyman, television – there has always been a fascinating distraction for post-war American youth.
This focus by carriers and handset vendors is not likely to change soon. Four million potential new customers are born each year, Gillott pointed out. Replacement cycles among the very young are under 12 months, in contrast to adults’ 12- to 18-month replacement cycles. Turns out kids will drop their phones, swim with them, you name it.
“It’s stupid stuff,” Gillott said with a sigh.
He ought to know. Gillott said he has two children in this age bracket whose behavior often serves to illustrate his points.
