The survey indicated that undergraduates would prefer to receive the Apple products over their competitors by a statistically significant margin, while they appeared indifferent between the Kindle and Nook offerings. The study demonstrates the strength of undergraduates’ affinity for Apple products. That preference is shared across gender, income levels, and college class, indicating that the feeling is pervasive in the undergraduate culture.

From the giver’s perspective, however, most students would be at least moderately pleased to receive the Amazon or the Barnes and Noble tablets and the price tag is half or less than the cheapest iPad device. With these two devices just launched on the marketplace, a prospective giver must judge whether the user experience afforded by these tablets will measure up to the iPad at least in proportion to the price.

Kindle Fire comparison with Apple iPad2

Conducted during the week of November 14^th, the Roger Williams survey was conducted online with a sample of over 150 students drawn from SurveyMonkey’s Audience panel of respondents. According to Professor Edward Strong of the Mario J. Gabelli School of Business, the class began by studying the adoption of eReaders among college undergraduates. What they found was that Nielsen Research reported that college students were actually declining as a percentage of users of tablet computers and eReaders.

“After talking among the 23 students in our class and by conducting exploratory research, we found out that all of us had laptops and almost all of us had smartphones, but no one had an eReader and only one student had a tablet. We also confirmed that very few students polled at Roger Williams University, possess an eReader or tablet.” – Meghan Parez, Roger Williams student

Textbooks play a huge role in students’ lives, and at the beginning of the current eBook “boom” the idea of reducing the weight of textbooks by switching to the electronic format was thought to be compelling. Experience indicates, however, that eReaders do not fit the needs of frequent consultation, marginal note-taking and random access that typify student use.

“Increasing the number of people who use eReaders for textbooks has been a challenge. Even those who sell eReaders have downplayed the idea. Amazon has dropped the prices of their eReaders to as low as $79, but has left the Kindle DX, originally released as a textbook reader, priced at $379. As of now, using an eReader for textbooks is not practical.” – Melanie Saltys, Roger Williams student

As recent surveys and books have indicated, undergraduate reading has decreased in recent years, so in addition to the difficulty of using eReaders for textbooks, students spend little time in reading for leisure. The typical respondent to the Roger Williams survey reported spending between four and six hours per week in reading, and less than ten percent of that time was spent in reading for pleasure.

“Reading isn’t really a big pastime for our generation. We read what we need to read for class, study, go to class and then, if I have any leisure time left over, frankly, I’d rather just watch television. If I do want to read an eBook, I can do it on my laptop or my smartphone. I don’t think my generation will be big in owning dedicated eReaders.” – Morgan Barresse, Roger Williams student

The Roger Williams study indicates that college undergraduates see tablet computers as an also-ran in desirability while their preferences with respect to brand are clear. The study indicated that only 11 percent of undergraduates had tablets and 12 percent had eReaders. At the same time, 96 percent had laptops and 50 percent had smartphones. Almost 40 percent of the laptops and 45 percent of the smartphones were Apple products.

This broad ownership of devices with screen sizes just on either side of tablet computers makes tablets seem less desirable to undergraduates. As the focus of the study shifted to tablet computers, it was apparent that the higher perceived initial cost of a tablet computer (as compared with a smartphone) meant that few students felt compelled to buy a tablet.

“For this study, we attempted to measure how much of a premium an undergraduate student is willing to pay for an Apple iPad versus some other tablet brand.  Our hypothesis was that tablets are a luxury item for students who already own smartphones and laptops, so they will not purchase a tablet with their own money.  Due to this, our questionnaire measured how much pleasure a student would get from receiving one tablet or another as a gift.  This measure allowed us gauge the difference in pleasure given by an iPad versus other tablets. “ – David Sotolotto, Roger Williams student

I’m trying to teach Marketing Research this fall (for the first time in probably 25 years), and I love the texture of this statement about observation and inference. (The classic statement on inference remains Ian Fleming’s character Auric Goldfinger on running across James Bond: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”)

I hope I can teach my students to observe many and converse with handfuls…and then draw meaningful inferences.

Hey Pops -

I’m totally loving this Corvette commercial… and I don’t like Chevy (sorry, Chevrolet) cars, nor have I ever been too fond of the Corvette. (If I’m going to buy an expensive sportscar, Chevy isn’t the first car company that comes to mind).

http://www.nitrobahn.com/news/2011-chevrolet-corvette-features-in-a-short-commercial/

To which I responded:

Well, it’s done by Goodby, Silverstein (think Got Milk?), so it’s well-crafted and hits on a good core idea. Unfortunately for them, their attempt at a Hal Riney voiceover doesn’t have the resonance of the real thing (the Reagan re-election campaign), so it’s not going to wear as well.

Also, they are counting on the fact that no one remembers that the original Corvette wasn’t conceived as “a rocket,” but rather a personal sports car (the Thunderbird was Ford’s entry). So the voiceover confounds the origins of the space program with the visuals of building today’s Corvette engine…eventually, I think, resulting in a sort of hollow, ho-hum feeling. But at low levels of repetition it will probably do well and they really aren’t interested in selling more Corvettes. It’s part of a larger GM – Chevrolet image campaign in preparation for their public stock offering tentatively planned for this fall.

But it’s fine for you to like it. Since you and I own GM, we should be pleased.

Pops

And then he went:

Now… obviously I understand that the Corvette was not a “rocket” in any way, shape or form as originally conceived (nor is it now), but those cars brought people closer to feeling the power of an engine – thus “rocket” – than ever before (if you didn’t have the money or means to ever own or see a classic European sports car), no?

At least it seems to me they’re successfully rewriting history

Bubba

p.s. We own GM what?!?

So I said:

When GM accepted the bail-out and went through bankruptcy, the US govt (hence, you and I) got controlling ownership of the company. Now the 55-year-old Charlie Wilson quote (“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” he said) is really true.

If you go back and examine the word “rocket” with respect to GM, you’ll find that as part of the post-World War II design of the GM family of brands (Harley Earl’s brainchild), it was Oldsmobile that was promoted as “the Rocket,” with models like the Rocket 88 and the Rocket 98. The Oldsmobile overhead-cam V8 engine was nicknamed the “Rocket.”

The original Corvette first shown in 1953 was powered by a “souped-up” six-cylinder engine, but it wasn’t the engine that got the hype, it was the fact that it was the first US production automobile with a fiberglass body. So…no, the Corvette didn’t start out to be “a rocket.”

Pops

(See my earlier auto rants)

Last year I made it pretty clear (in Kick as Kick Can and Auto Rants (2)) that the problem with Chevrolet as a brand isn’t that people use a diminutive and endearing term once promoted by GM (Dinah Shore sang it long before they were driven to the levee). The problem is that Chevrolet doesn’t refer to anything identifiable but rather to an incredible range of vehicles that start with a Chevrolet-branded Daewoo manufactured in Korea and proceed upward in size and power through the Corvette and a series of heavy-duty trucks.

Bob Lutz is gone from the hallways of General Motors, but this latest brain-dead solution to GM’s branding problems is a case of thinking ‘way down deep within the same old box. As Ford is in the process of recognizing with the proposed elimination of the Mercury brand, re-badging vehicles with multiple brands is counter-productive in today’s market. Ford would compete in the US market with *gasp* only two brands.

Other things I understand pretty easily include the idea that pine tar soap should help my scaly scalp condition. I can understand that because it’s one of those things that people just wouldn’t do if it wasn’t good for them…like mixing sulphur and molasses into a poultice and spreading it on an aching joint. That still leaves me with the problem of why the first guy with an itchy scalp thought it would be a nifty idea to spread pine pitch on his head; there are lots of other nasty things that you can apply to your head. Maybe he’d tried all of those. Which makes you kind of sure he was a social outcast.

But my problem today is that I just unwrapped a new bar of soap from the Dial soap people and I need help in understanding it. The wrapper claims that the soap is made with cranberries and is a great source of antioxidants. The scent is correct, although probably artificial. But why am I rubbing antioxidants on my outsides? Why couldn’t I just add a quart of Ocean Spray to my bath? Am I in danger of serving the Thanksgiving turkey with a slice of Dial on the side? Why is there no blueberry soap?

While I work on the answers to these questions, I offer you this image of the hawk spotted during yesterday morning’s walk. The birds in the neighborhood were all chattering, making sure he felt like an outcast.

The answer to that question should have been clear from the July 14th Wall Street Journal headline advising that Mr. Lutz was toying with the idea of breathing some life into the almost-dead corpse of the Pontiac division by resurrecting the Chevrolet Caprice model name and putting it on the Pontiac G8.

The answer is no, Bob Lutz is not the right guy to run GM’s marketing.

He’s 77. He’s retired from GM once already. He is steeped in the tradition of the US automobile industry. The G8 fizzled after it’s 2007 introduction, but sales are picking up…so the logical conclusion is to make sure we hold on to this model, “citing nascent demand.”

In the depths of the Depression, Packard Motor Car company hired production and sales executives from General Motors because Packard didn’t understand how to make or sell a popularly-priced car to save their souls. It worked!

The equivalent in today’s market in which GM has been unable to sell automobiles profitably would be for GM to hire marketing and production executives from Toyota.

Mr. Lutz, you have to narrow the range of models offered by each of your surviving divisions, not broaden them; you have to reduce the overlap of models, not further confuse them.

Clarity, Mr. Lutz. Focus. One big winner, not a half-dozen stunted, resource-sucking minor models that you produce for inventory (not demand) and then have to liquidate.