Survey of smartphone owners shows the power of brand loyalty

Back in 2013, the Wall Street Journal commissioned a survey of U.S., U.K. and Australian smartphone owners to see which manufacturers had the most loyal customers. It was a simple test, really. The Businessman's Bible merely wanted to know how many smartphone owners replaced their handset in 2013 with a model made by the same manufacturer who built their previous model. 3000 smartphone owners took part in the survey.

On top was Apple. 76% of those who started last year with an Apple iPhone, ended the year with a newer iPhone model. Samsung was next with a 58% retention rate. And in third place was LG. 37% of those with an LG smartphone stuck with the brand for their next phone. Nokia and HTC were close to LG with retention rates of 33% and 30% respectively. Sony (24%), Motorola (22%) and BlackBerry (21%) round out the list.

So what can we take away from this information? Perhaps nothing. A study we told you about last month found that 60% of 2000 polled iPhone owners in the  U.K. have a "blind loyalty" to Apple, meaning that when it comes time to purchase a new handset, they buy the next iPhone just because it has an Apple on the back, never taking the time to look at new models from the competition.



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Hulu sells its Japan operations to a local broadcaster, licenses brand name and tech

Hulu jumped into overseas expansion of subscription video streaming services around the same time as its competitors Netflix and Amazon, but now it's taking a step back. New CEO Mike Hopkins announced one of his first big moves in a blog post, revealing that Hulu Japan has been sold to Nippon TV, one of the top TV networks in the country. In Japan the Hulu Plus-style approach has been the only one offered, with a pay subscription opening up access to a mix of local and imported-from-the-US programming, including HBO. According to Hopkins, not a lot should change for subscribers. While Nippon TV will take over day-to-day operations and expand the content available with some of its own stuff, Hulu is licensing its brand and technology to the company.

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Source: Hulu Blog, Nippon TV

Tags: hdpostcross, hulu, japan, mikehopkins, nippontv, sale Next: Pieces might be falling into place for a Minecraft movie from Warner Bros. .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Intel kills off McAfee Security brand

Intel takes branding ownership of McAfee's computer security suite and severs founder John McAfee's name from the security software that has borne it for more than 20 years.

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Rewarding Real Life Product Placement - Brand Recognition in Instagram Photos

Author: Brian Patterson
Published: January 02, 2014 at 9:19 pm ShareTweet  Chances are you haven’t heard of Bolthouse Farms before, but if their new marketing campaign performs as they hope, that just may change. Bolthouse Farms is a purveyor of fruit and vegetable juice blends, akin to popular brands such as Nantucket Nectars, Naked Juice, and Odwalla. Bolthouse Farms’ drinks are sold nationally, are likely in your local grocery store, and its even possible that you’ve bought their products before.  However, to date, strong branding and recognition has been an issue, hence a fresh, new marketing campaign. Instagram Image Recognition Beginning at the end of October, and with the help of ad agency Tiny Rebellion and RevTrax, a marketing technology company that drives in-store sales through digital coupons, Bolthouse rolled out a technology that identifies its products in images posted on Instagram, and rewards those users with coupons when they they’ve shared a product picture (on a non-private account) and used the hashtags #gotcoupon and #carrotfarmers.   Tiny Rebellion built a tool that monitors the Twitter firehose, and anytime the Bolthouse logo is spotted in an image (generally on a bottle), it is flagged by their tool.  In Bolthouse’s campaign, however, the coupon is only issued if the user takes the extra step of also using the two campaign hashtags. Once the system checks that the hashtags were used, it issues a $1.50 coupon and notifies the image sharer via a comment directly on their image, all in about 60 seconds.  The coupon can then be printed off, but only by the image poster as the ‘print’ button is behind an Instagram login screen that validates that the user is indeed authorized to print the coupon. Although very clever, the system isn’t perfect yet.  For example, the tool didn’t initially recognize my image when the bottle was posted to Instagram, so Bolthouse’s backup plan kicked-in and a coupon was manually issued about an hour after my test. Also, I was left wanting a little more than the auto-response of “Bottle Recognized!” before the coupon details were provided.  But that is a personal preference and something easily changed as the campaign evolves.  The Results I spoke with Pamela Naumes, Director of Brand Engagement at Bolthouse Farms, to get a better understanding of the program and its success.  Naumes explained that prints of the coupon from this campaign are higher than all of their other current online marketing channels, including Facebook ads and paid search. And of the people who are invited to print the coupon, 65 percent actually do, a statistic the Bolthouse Farms team is quite proud of.  Although exact numbers weren’t shared, a quick search of the hashtag #carrotfarmers on statigr.am shows that it has been used 5,697 thus far.  Assuming those are all legitimate entries, that would put 65 percent coupon prints at somewhere around 3,700.  Not bad distribution for two months.  Overall, Naumes states, that, “What we love about this program is that, unlike TV or print, this does three things:  It drives awareness that we own the farms.  It drives trial of our beverages. And it’s driving engagement”.    Are you following @BolthouseFarms on Instagram? We love all of their creative 15 second recipes: http://t.co/BlPHYy591z— Campbell Soup Co (@CampbellSoupCo) December 4, 2013 Because of this social success, Bolthouse Farms has decided to extend the campaign longer than originally planned, and invest more in January to promote the program more fully.       About this article Article Author: Brian Patterson

Brian Patterson is a Washington, DC-based Online Reputation Management consultant, author, and speaker. Brian has helped individuals and firms solve a wide range of complex online reputation issues. Follow him on Twitter.

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Sprint Wants To Revive Nextel As A Business Brand, Merge Boost + Virgin Mobile Into ‘Sprint Freedom’

It was only six months ago that Sprint decommissioned and shut down the Nextel iDEN push-to-talk network, and while the carrier has no plans to bring that legacy service back, the brand is another story.

According to a source close to the company, Sprint wants to introduce Nextel again — as a brand for business services. The source tells TechCrunch that this is part of a larger branding overhaul coming in Q1 in which Sprint plans to launch a new prepaid brand called “Sprint Freedom” — merging Boost and Virgin Mobile.

Sprint declined to comment for this story, but if the information from the source is accurate, the moves point to Sprint raising its game targeting businesses (particularly smaller and medium businesses) as well as streamlining its patchwork of services.

It also fits with the idea of Sprint – now majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank – marching on in consolidation mode, shoring up to present a more competitive face against the likes of AT&T and Verizon. Most recently, Sprint has been reportedly preparing an offer for T-Mobile USA, its latest move after acquiring Clear and buying a portion of U.S. Cellular earlier this year.

The Nextel service, our source says, will be part of a bigger push to court business customers. That makes some sense: Nextel’s existing business subscriber base, and brand recognition with that segment, were seen as some of the main reasons behind Sprint’s $35 billion acquisition of the company in the first place.

The new Nextel business, says the source, will be underpinned by more service streamlining: it will be a “premium” offering consisting of the 4G fixed and mobile broadband services that were originally the Clear business. The Nextel name, our source says, will go “on top of everything that was Clear and then target businesses.”

Along with previously-Clear services, there will also be more devices introduced, specifically around Sprint Spark — the tri-band LTE service debuted earlier this year that gives users faster speeds and more reliable connectivity.

Introduced with smartphones from HTC (the One max), LG (G2) and Samsung (Galaxy Mega and Samsung Galaxy S4 mini), Sprint Spark will be extended with two hotspots and three tablets as part of the offering.

And with that, some changes also around pricing, apparently. “Unlimited data options will come back for the hotspots at a premium, but pricing will be tiered by speed,” the source claims. Sprint will also introduce group plans that will apply to the new Nextel devices.

Sprint Freedom

Another part of plan, says that source, concerns Sprint’s prepaid businesses Virgin Mobile and Boost. Collectively, users on these two networks may generate less revenue than Sprint’s postpaid operations, but they serve as a useful counterbalance to the other service, adding customers last quarter as the number of ARPU-rich postpaid users declined.

Like Nextel and Clear, Virgin Mobile and Boost came to Sprint via acquisitions, and it looks like the carrier is now putting that in order, too.

Boost and Virgin Mobile will get wrapped into a new, single service called “Sprint Freedom.” It’s not entirely clear but it sounds as if this could mean the eventual scrapping of the two existing brands. Assurance Wireless, the free mobile phone service provided by Virgin Mobile under the Universal Service Fund, will not be affected, our source says.

While a lot of these plans sound like logical consolidation moves for the company, the question mark will be whether Sprint will manage to juggle all the changes without dropping anything (or anyone) in the process. A new Nextel business service would effectively mean a double-leap with a set of legacy products: first turning the Clear service into one focused less on consumers and more on businesses; and second rebranding it as a Nextel offering, but different from what Sprint was selling as a Nextel service not too long ago.

In the meantime, it is also not clear how a service called Sprint Freedom would sit alongside other services also called “Freedom” — such as Sprint’s international calling plans, not to mention the Freedom Pop “free” wireless service that is a wholesale customer on Sprint’s network.

And just as the closure of the Nextel brand earlier this year may have left some wondering whether Sprint would really let Nextel disappear into thin air, now the same might be said for Boost, Virgin Mobile and Clear. “It’s been a contentious issue for many,” our source said of the internal response to the changes. Perhaps one reason why these details got leaked to us.

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Huawei's Honor brand challenges Xiaomi with 3X and 3C low-cost phones

Huawei's known for its Ascend smartphones around the world, but back in late 2011, the company also started toying with a small Honor series for select budget markets. Fast forward to today, the latter sub-brand has become Huawei's platform to compete with the sudden surge of affordable online brands in China -- most notably Xiaomi, the pioneer of that industry. With a little help from MediaTek (and ironically not Huawei's own HiSilicon), the phone maker is upping its firepower over this territory with two new dual-SIM devices: Honor 3X and Honor 3C.

The Honor 3X joins the first wave of octa-core 1.7GHz MT6592-powered devices, and it boasts 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel f/2.2 main camera, a 5-megapixel 1.4-micron front imager plus a generous 3,000mAh battery. The 720p resolution on the glove-friendly, 5.5-inch IPS touchscreen may seem like a let-down, but in this case, Huawei reasoned that going 1080p would push power consumption up by as much as 20 percent, plus many folks may not notice the visual difference -- a point that Huawei Device Chairman Richard Yu has often echoed publicly.

On a brighter note, the 3X is the first phone to feature dual-3G SIM slots -- one Mini SIM and one Micro SIM -- for WCDMA (China Unicom and most carriers around the world) and TD-SCDMA (China Mobile). Better yet, both slots will recognize either type of 3G radio, as opposed to having designated slots for each. There's also a dual-mic system for in-call noise cancellation, as well as DTS audio support. The price? From just CN¥1,698 or about $280 off-contract, making it a tad more affordable than the Xiaomi MI3. Alas, there's no launch date just yet.

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Say hello to Rezence, your new wireless charging brand

All of these devices can theoretically be charged in one spot.

(Credit:A4WP)

Meet the new wireless charging technology, same as the old wireless charging technology.

It's called Rezence (pronounced like "reh-zence"), and it is the new brand for the Alliance 4 Wireless Power (A4WP), a group of high-profile technology companies -- which counts Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm, and Intel as key members -- pitching a next-generation form of wireless charging.

In fact, it hopes Rezence becomes as well known as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Wireless charging, which allows you to place a phone or other device on a pad to recharge its battery, is found in select tech products and stores, but it's largely still a niche feature.

One of the biggest impediments to the broader adoption of wireless charging -- which seems like a no-brainer kind of feature to have -- are three competing and incompatible standards:

There's the Power Matters Alliance, which has created charging stations in select Starbucks and McDonald's, as well as cases for popular phones such as the iPhone. The group is largely driven by Powermat Technologies and Procter & Gamble.

Then, there's the Wireless Power Consortium, which uses a standard called Qi that is commonly used in Nokia smartphones and other select devices from manufacturers such as HTC and LG Electronics.

Lastly, there's the A4WP, which prior to Thursday's announcement, didn't have a public presence or brand, and doesn't yet have products in the marketplace.

With the PMA and WPC battling it out in the market with no clear winner, it's the A4WP that hopes to usurp both with arguably better technology.

Related storiesApple patents zero in on wireless charging, Mac Pro designQualcomm weighs in on the state of wireless charging Wireless charging powers shift as Samsung, Qualcomm take sidesPlugShare adds EV charging payment capabilityNexus 5 log tips wireless charging, Miracast, themes

Rezence is named after the technology it is based off, called magnetic resonance. This version of wireless charging allows for multiple devices to lie on the same pad to get a charge, be moved around, or even go through small obstructions such as a magazine or piece of paper.

Qi and the PMA standard both use a technology called inductive charging, where devices need to be specifically laid on a charging pad in order to connect. Both the PMA and WPC are starting to look for ways to add the kinds of features that Rezence promises.

In the meantime, Rezence is going to get rolling with products in the coming year, with many launching next year, according to Geoff Gordon, a product manager at Qualcomm who serves as the chairman of the marketing committee for the A4WP. He said that the Consumer Electronics Show will serve as a showcase for these products.

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Alliance for Wireless Power introduces Rezence as its consumer-friendly brand

The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) was formed over a year ago to come up with a wireless charging solution that would allow for greater spatial freedom when charging your favorite gadgets. "A4WP" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue however, which is why the group today announced its consumer-facing brand, hereby known as Rezence. The release states that the name was derived from the words resonance and essence, which tells the tale of how the technology works -- that of non-radiative magnetic resonance -- and how it can be used to charge all kinds of devices, not just phones. Indeed, the alliance teased us that a major PC OEM has just got on board, and will reveal more about it at CES next month.

The logo, which is simply the letter Z with an electricity symbol running through the middle, will be used on all devices that have gone through A4WP certification. This way, consumers will know that any surface with the logo will play nice with a Rezence-compatible item. Geoff Gordon of Qualcomm, who's also A4WP's marketing committee chair, tells us that the introduction of the Rezence brand goes hand-in-hand with the certification program it's about to roll out by year's end. Indeed, they've just completed their third and final Plugfest, which is an event where electronics makers get together to ensure interoperability of a certain standard. While we're not sure just what devices will be incorporated with the Rezence technology -- that's up to the individual member companies to decide -- it seems we'll finally be able to see the fruits of A4WP's labor sooner rather than later. To find out more about Rezence and A4WP, go on and hit the source link below.

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Source: Rezence

Tags: a4wp, allianceforwirelesspower, rezence, wirelesscharging Next: UK mobile phone users to get free 0800 calls by mid-2015 .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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