On or around October 7, BlackBerry users in Europe started noticing problems with their email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. By October 12, the outage had spread to North America. Not all of BlackBerry’s 70 million customers were affected, but a significant portion certainly were.

"How did the recent BlackBerry outage make you feel?"

Copernicus saw an opportunity to understand a little more about the BlackBerry user and their attachment to their smartphone. We decided to strike while the iron was hot! We immediately launched an online survey to get users’ fresh impressions of the BlackBerry outage.

This is the first of several analytical papers we will offer, based on the data collected.

BlackBerry Outage Survey Report by Copernicus Consulting Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at copernicusconsulting.net.

Two of us at Copernicus (Sarah and I) are working on a project, funded through Ryerson University, on smartphone usage. One of the key findings we’ve uncovered so far is that people tend to adopt new communication channels (e.g., text) when they purchase new handsets. This new handset/life change correlation is a symbolic ritual that leads to new ways of communicating.

New phone, courtesy of emotionaltoothpaste on Flickr.com

When do they purchase new handsets? When their lives change in some way. Here’s an example.

We spoke to one young professional who was telling us when he started using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). He noticed that he started using it more when he got his new BlackBerry handset, but it was also around the time he got engaged to his fiancée (who also had just gotten a BlackBerry). So he wasn’t sure if it was because he got the new BlackBerry or because he got engaged.

This type of life event was a recurrent theme. Participants got new handsets when they went away to university, when they started a new job, when they got a promotion, when they moved house. Or they purchased them for their children when they reached a certain age.

This type of ritualistic consumption is common. We have talked about this before in our analysis of autumn jean buying. People buy certain items to equip themselves for the new season, but also to symbolically mark the shift from one state to the next. There are practical reasons why one would purchase a new handset when one is moving house, for example, but there is also a deeply symbolic transformation taking place.

Participants are hiving off the past by giving up their old handsets. They are preparing for the future (at university, at the new job, with the new partner) when they are upgrading to a new, “futuristic” piece of technology. Just like new jeans are symbolic of a new school year, new handsets are symbolic of a new way to relate to new people or things in your life.

New handsets are not just new phones; they are new ways to communicate. Our participants did not intend to re-invent how they talked/texted/BBM’d but they did intend to change their lives in some way. Texting for the first time seems natural when you’re embracing another life change. Using BBM for the first time makes sense if your new fiance already uses it. Answering email on the bus for the first time is not weird if everyone at the new office does it.

I have argued in the past that financial services providers should only ever look to life changes as triggers for new products. It’s clear that new products go hand in hand with new life events. In this case, new products and new life events correlate with new technology adoption.

Technology designers should consider what events are the triggers, and incorporate these symbolically into their mobile platforms. Advertisers should understand that getting consumers accustomed to new mobile content means understanding their new life situations. Employers should understand that new hires and the newly promoted are adjusting to new ways of communicating, usually because they are given new phones without much discussion. And parents should realize that symbolic ages for their children (e.g., age 16) will often mean new ways of communicating. Just teaching your son or daughter to drive is the start of it — you may also have to learn how to BBM.

In our work with Ryerson University, we are uncovering some interesting findings about domestic mobile phone use. For example, mobile phones are affecting family management:

Smartphones bind families closer: some participants told us that their texting increased when they upgraded to a smartphone. A discrete text to one’s spouse is easily tolerated in the workplace, making it much easier to stay in touch than through voice only. Partners tend to be sending quick texts to each other throughout the day, thereby binding their lives closer together and facilitating their domestic management.

We know that the family is changing. Copernicus researchers have gone into family homes to understand how changing ideas of gender are affecting product use, cultural beliefs, and everyday practices. The mobile study is another example of how the family — usually a taken-for-granted category — is a dynamic, changing form.

Read more about these initial findings and our exciting project.

As we go forward with this work, we’ll be updating the public on these fantastic insights. Stay tuned!

I’m thrilled to be managing a research project on mobile technology use through a fellowship at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. I’ve assembled a research team and we have started initial research. Our “ethnographic stretching” exercise lead to some interesting insights:

“Attachment Paradox”: More than one person we talked to said that their mobile phone meant nothing to them. “It’s just a device. There’s no attachment to it,” said one person. Yet, this same person said she’d “panic” if she lost it. How can they be anxious of its loss, yet “unattached” at the same time? Again, more work to be done here.

Check out some of the other insights on the Mobile Work Life project Web site

Copernicus Consulting is pleased to announce that its founder and Principle, Dr. Sam Ladner, will be conducting research with Dr. Catherine Middleton at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management. Dr. Ladner will lead the research on the social effects of mobile phones and work/life balance.

“I’m thrilled be working with Catherine on this project,” Dr. Ladner said. “It’s been my personal academic interest for a long time. I’m very excited to collaborate with her.” Dr. Middleton is the Canada Research Chair in Communication Technologies in the Information Society.

The project is in its early stages (see the placeholder mobileworklife.ca or @mobileworklife for more information). Currently, Dr. Middleton and Dr. Ladner are sketching out the specific research activities, but the general approach will be ethnographic in nature.

“From my previous research, I discovered that mobile devices have a distinct impact on how private lives are separated from work lives,” said Dr. Ladner. “I plan to uncover how and in what ways these tools live with us in our homes and in our offices.”

The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research team is currently interested in recruiting companies and individuals to participate.

Dr. Ladner will continue at the helm of Copernicus as she leads the mobile work life research effort. “We do so many mobile-related projects, that this was a perfect fit,” she explained.

The music industry is in a pickle. CD sales are falling, big-name artists are signing with touring companies. Independent artists are having a go on their own. The solution, the industry thinks, is to sell its music through mobile phones.

They are dead wrong. Here’s why.

Mobile phone users don’t use music in the same way that music listeners do. Music listeners — whether at home or on the go with their iPod — are listening to what the artist has created. Even “digital” forms of the music are still relatively analogue because the listener cannot slice and dice the music into a new mashup. The best she can do is skip a track (which she has done since the times of vinyl).

Music on mobile phones has both “listening” and impression management behaviors. Mobile phone users use music more often to present a version of themselves to the public world than they do to actually “listen.”

Music on mobile phones has truly become what Nicholas Negroponte calls “co-mingling bits.” Mobile phone operators have already sliced and diced the music into snippets for its users to use in various ways. The ringtone is one version. The “ringback,” which a caller hears when he’s waiting for his friend to answer her phone, is another version.

Now mobile phone users can download all sorts of “co-mingling bits” off the Web. Some of these bits happen to be musical. Some of them are unrecognizable from what the artist originally intended.

This kind of behavior is not listening to music; it is impression management. What is the effect, for example, when your friend hears Paranoid while he waits for you to pick up the phone? What is the effect if it were I Can Hear You Breathe?

Music companies think� this new form of music consumption can save the industry. They hope that album sales will be replaced with mobile phone downloads of full tracks. They are wrong.

Consider the following numbers from eMarketer.

Full track downloads as percentage of ringback and ringtone downloads:
2006: 23%
2007: 33%
2008: 47%

While the share is growing, it is certainly not replacing album sales. Artists should recognize that mobile phone music is not “music” but the public adornment of their art. And music companies should recognize that mobile phones will not save a bloated and dying industry.