NPD’s “Netbooks II: A Closer Look” report, found that 60% of consumers who purchased a netbook instead of a notebook thought their netbooks would have the same functionality as notebooks.
That confusion about functionality is leading to some dissatisfaction. Only 58% of consumers who bought a netbook instead of a notebook said they were very satisfied with their purchase, compared to 70% of consumers who planned on buying a netbook from the start.
Satisfaction was even harder to ascertain among 18- to 24-year-olds, one of the main demographics manufacturers were hoping to win over with the new products. Among that age group, 65% said they bought their netbooks expecting better performance, and only 27% said their netbooks performed better than expected.
One marketing aspect that has interested buyers is the portability factor. It’s been the key marketing tool for netbook manufacturers, and consumers agree that it is a great feature. Sixty percent of them said that was a main reason they bought their netbooks. However, once they got home, 60% of buyers said they never even took their netbooks out of the house.
“We need to make sure consumers are buying a PC intended for what they plan to do with it,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, in the press release. “There is a serious risk of cannibalization in the notebook market that could cause a real threat to netbooks’ success. Retailers and manufacturers can’t put too much emphasis on PC-like capabilities and general features that could convince consumers that a netbook is a replacement for a notebook. Instead, they should be marketing mobility, portability, and the need for a companion PC to ensure consumers know what they are buying and are more satisfied with their purchases.”
Nearly 600 adults from NPD’s online panel who were identified as netbook owners completed this survey between April 27 and May 4, 2009.
Source The NPD Group, Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: If only the world’s average IQ were 5 points higher. It must be God’s cruel joke.
This particular downturn is not creating a market of cheaper computers. That market has existed for some time and there are parts of that market that we choose not to play in.
I think when people want a product of the class that we make, over and over again people have done the price comparisons and we’re actually quite competitive. So we choose to be in certain segments of the market and we choose not to be in certain segments of the market. And the question is, is the downturn going to drive some of our customers to those lower segments of the marketplace and get to buy lesser products? And I will be surprised if that happens in large numbers. And I actually think that there are still a tremendous number of customers that we don’t have in the Windows world, or in the other 99% of the phone market we don’t have, who would like to, and can afford to, buy Apple products. So we’ll see what the ratio of those two things are, but we’re not tremendously worried.
As we look at the netbook category, that’s a nascent category. There’s as best as we can tell not a lot of them getting sold. You know, one of our entrants into that category, if you will, is the iPhone for browsing the Internet and doing e-mail and all the other things that a netbook lets you do, and being connected via the cellular net wherever you are, an iPhone is a pretty good solution for that, and it fits in your pocket. But we’ll wait and see how that nascent category evolves and we’ve got some pretty interesting ideas if it does evolve. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, October 21, 2008
We can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. The difference is, we don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, August 7, 2007
[Attribution: Electronista. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ottawa Mark” for the heads up.]
