UK Normobs: We're not buying Samsung again

Researchers YouGov asked almost 4,000 UK adults to comment on their mobile phone purchase intentions. Interestingly the majority of users expect to change handset brands next time the get a chance. It makes interesting reading so I’m going to cut and paste YouGov’s feedback:

Step changes in technology always provide opportunities for significant shifts in market share driven by reduced loyalty and YouGov’s new Smartphone Mobile Internet Experience study highlights the opportunities for non-traditional handset brands in the smartphone gold rush. How smartphone handset brands are regarded by their users is the foundation of YouGov’s new report.

The newer but more focused handset brands are shown to be the best regarded by UK smartphone users with Apple and BlackBerry leading the remainder of major handset brands.

The majority of users do not expect to get their next handset from their current brand / manufacturer. The winners in this are Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia, and HTC. At the other end of the scale only just over a third of Sony Ericsson’s and LG’s users expect to get the same brand handset next time around, just over a quarter of Motorola’s current users can be considered loyal but the brand most users expect to switch from is Samsung (only 21% expect to replace their Samsung with a Samsung). In contrast nearly four fifths (79%) of Apple users believe they will get a handset from Apple the next time they upgrade or purchase a new handset.

“Whichever metrics you look at, Apple and BlackBerry lead the smartphone pack in terms of satisfaction, recommendation and loyalty”, commented Marek Vaygelt, Head of Technology & Telecoms Consulting at YouGov. He continued, “The traditional handset brands are suffering in this transition to smartphones and even Nokia, normally a brand with high loyalty, has lost ground.”

Furthermore, the survey shows that mobile Internet users value ease of use, menu navigation and function speed as the three most important attributes of a mobile Internet handset, all areas where Apple in particular demonstrates market leadership.

Here’s the associated graphic:

Samsung is not doing well at all, is it? I wonder if that’s because the majority of Samsung users in the UK are perhaps using rather limited feature phones? (A rather broad assumption, I know).

I think Motorola’s 28% is representative of the amount of people using older-generation Motorolas. I wonder how Droid or Milestone users would react to the survey.

So, how about you? Are you sticking with your current brand or swapping?

Me: I’m pretty concerned about hopping from a BlackBerry Bold 9000 to a Bold 9700 simply because they’ve made it smaller. And I really, really like the wide QWERTY keyboard on the original Bold… What’s a guy to do?