The handset maker that appeared to suffer the most in the period was Samsung, according to Gartner. The South Korean tech giant saw the largest decline in sales among the top five smartphone makers, seeing its sales slip by 27.1 per cent from Q2 2019 to 55m. Despite this, it still – just about – kept its place as the number one smartphone vendor.

“The COVID-19 pandemic continued to negatively affect Samsung’s performance in the second quarter of 2020,” said Anshul Gupta, Senior Research Director at Gartner. “Demand for its flagship S Series smartphones did little to revive its smartphone sales globally.”

Huawei, though seeing its YoY sales drop by 6.8 per cent to 54m, came pretty close to Samsung in the race for the number one spot. Quarter-over-quarter, it experienced growth of 27.4 per cent.

“Huawei’s performance in China helped it avoid a worse quarterly performance,” added Gupta. “Huawei extended its lead in China where it captured 42.6 per cent of China’s smartphone market in the second quarter of 2020. Huawei put in place an aggressive product introduction and sales promotion in China in particular and benefited from the strong support of communications services providers for its 5G smartphones.”

Apple suffered the least out of the top handset makers, only sliding 0.4 per cent to 38m compared to Q2 2019. The fourth and fifth biggest vendors, Xiaomi and Oppo, suffered declines of 21.5 per cent and 15.9 per cent respectively.

“Apple’s iPhone sales fared better in the quarter than most smartphone vendors in the market and also grew sales quarter-over-quarter,” said Annette Zimmermann, Research Vice President at Gartner. “The improved business environment in China helped Apple achieve growth in the country. In addition, the introduction of the new iPhone SE encouraged users of older phones upgrade their smartphones.”

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You know the story. Today’s digital media is charged with fragmenting and polarizing our culture beyond recognition by isolating us in social filter bubbles. It’s personalized and tribalized our experiences until we no longer live in the same reality as our neighbors. And it’s all about selling more persuasive advertising by relentlessly tracking and targeting our affinities and intents.

How refreshing then, that, once a year, advertisers take a break from all this precision targeting and conversion-rate optimization to return to their Mad Men roots with creative executions designed to play to a national audience. Despite recent declines in NFL viewership, with about 100m viewers expected, no other event can gather so much of our fractured country into a single, rapt audience as the Super Bowl.

Still, this year’s advertiser challenge is particularly daunting: how to come up with a meaningful, inspiring brand message that resonates broadly with a divided nation on-edge in an election year, while avoiding the withering outrage that follows the slightest misfire.

Strong demand
And yet, defying the death-knell of mass media, advertiser demand for Super Bowl ads was surprisingly strong this year. In November, Fox reported its Super Bowl LIV inventory sold out earlier than it has for the past nine years – at record prices as high as $5.6m (£4.2m) per 30-second spot according to Ad Week. This lines up with Gartner research that indicates CMOs upped their investments in paid media from 23 per cent to 26 per cent of their total marketing budgets in 2019, and their commitment to TV remained solid, even though overall marketing budgets dropped for this first time since 2014. How can we explain all this?

Ironically, rather than cannibalizing Super Bowl ad investments, digital media has greatly amplified their reach, frequency, and impact. Last year, Ipsos reported that as many people had seen Super Bowl ads on YouTube as on live TV (per NetImperative) – and more than half are viewed on mobile devices. Perhaps more important, these ads drive valuable engagement in the form of social media conversations. According to Engagement Labs, Bud Light, for example, drove more than a 1000 per cent increase in conversations following its 2019 Super Bowl ad series. Earned media isn’t dead, but it needs a big paid media spark to set it off. And the Super Bowl provides a singular ignition opportunity.

In keeping with this irony, three of TV’s most threatening digital competitors, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, all stepped up to get in this year’s game. We can infer that, with all their data and processing capacity, they evaluated the opportunity thoroughly before committing.

So how are advertisers dealing with the risks of making such high-profile statements in such a hostile environment? Let’s look at some telling examples.

Google
The grandmaster of data, Google has dropped a deeply emotional spot about the heart-wrenching frailty of age and memory, driving home the message that this technology company has a heart. You’d need a heart of stone to watch this ad without getting choked up. You just can’t do that with a paid search or banner ad.

Key takeaway: strong emotion transcends cultural barriers, and only video can deliver it. (By the way, you can watch the pre-released ads and teasers on YouTube’s AdBlitz.)

Facebook
Facebook, a newcomer to the Super Bowl ad scene whose brand has been under siege by politicians and activists, focuses its ‘More Together’ campaign on Facebook Groups, an ironic subject to pitch on the most generically inclusive celebration media has to offer. The campaign features iconic celebrities like Sylvester Stallone (who leaked the ad) and Chris Rock, putting group enthusiasm in its most positive light. It offers a convincing rebuttal to the dark side of group tribalism.

Key takeaway: when pitching to a diverse, fragmented audience, sell the benefits of diversity and fragmentation.

Beer brands
For the final example we turn from tech to the stalwart category of Super Bowl branding, beer. AB InBev, owner of the Michelob and Budweiser brands, demonstrates a bold approach to polarization by carefully aligning its brands with opposing cohorts vying to define ‘America’.

Michelob Ultra goes organic. “America,” intones a low female voice, “less than one per cent of our farm land is organic.” The spot opens on a bearded millennial farmer in a field at sunset. It goes on to pitch a cause-related promotion: “Pick up a six-pack, we’ll help transition six square feet of farm land to organic.” It invokes horseback riders, urban street dancers, surfers, and youthful, African-American football fans in a transformational montage of hypothetical donors: “We could change America’s organic farm land forever.” (Just by buying a six-pack of Michelob.) Go SF!

Contrast this with Budweiser’s approach. ‘Typical Americans’ opens with a gritty male voice: “They call us…’typical Americans’…” Note the ‘us versus them’ theme right up front. The ad goes on to invoke American pride and exceptionalism by sarcastically juxtaposing condescending elitist clichés of disapproval about Americans against authentic-looking images of real American heroism and communal harmony. “So the next time someone labels you ‘typical’ (cut to label image: ‘the great American’) show them what ‘typical’ can do.” Go KC!

Key takeaway: if you’re a house of brands, you can cover culture divides with a careful mapping of brands to core sensibilities.

So, what does this mean to brands who may not be ready for the Super Bowl? A number of things:

Recognize that branding still matters. If you’re completely focused on advertising ROI from direct sales, you’re missing the big picture. Don’t forget how the giant digital ad platforms you buy are spending their own marketing budgets.

It’s almost impossible to craft a brand message with significant impact that won’t draw censure from some quarters in the current cultural environment, so pick your values carefully and test your message with a friendly audience. Whether it’s humorously ironic or deadly serious, emotional impact is what people remember.

Finally, remember that successful advertising starts a dialog. Be prepared to follow through with authentic support. Tear down the walls between media and social engagement. Invite consumers to an open dialogue about advertising and values.

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MoEngage, an intelligent customer engagement platform, announced that it has received the highest overall ratings in the 2019 Gartner Voice of the Customer for Mobile Marketing Platforms Report. On a scale of 1 to 5, the company has received the highest overall rating of 4.6, among all the vendors featured in the report. The company has also received the highest rating of 4.7 and 4.5 respectively for customer support and ease of contracting.

Gartner’s “Voice of the Customer” is a report that consolidates thousands of customer reviews and stacks software vendors based on customer ratings across multiple parameters. Reviews go through a strict validation and moderation process to ensure they are authentic. As a result, the Voice of the Customer reports plays a key role in the software evaluation and buying process of enterprises. You can access a complimentary copy of the report here.

In its initial years, MoEngage started off as a push and in-app notification platform for small & medium mobile app publishers. Five years later, it has evolved into full-fledged customer analytics and omni-channel engagement platform. Today, 170 customers across 35 countries use MoEngage to build a unified view of their customers, analyze customer behavior and segment customers into micro-groups based their behavioral attributes. Furthermore, brands leverage MoEngages AI and automation capabilities to map customer journeys and provide hyper-personalized offers, updates, recommendations and other communications across web, mobile and email – thus delivering an omni-channel experience. MoEngage was featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, twice in a row, and counts several unicorns and enterprises brands as customers, including the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Travelodge, Samsung, McAfee, Vodafone, Future Retail, Landmark Group, Mashreq Bank and more.

“Being named in the 2019 Gartner Voice of the Customer for Mobile Marketing Platforms validates our commitment to provide enterprises with a world-class platform for mobile app analytics and omni-channel user engagement. I am absolutely excited to see the highly positive reviews & ratings by our customers. This reinforces our belief and investments, not just in product innovation, but also in building an outstanding sales, service and support team, that’s truly focused on making our customers successful. Our vision is to build the world’s most trusted customer engagement platform and we will continue to accelerate our investments in product innovation and in ramping up our global sales & support functions,” said Raviteja Dodda, co-founder & CEO, MoEngage Inc.

To read all MoEngage customer reviews on Gartner Peer Insights, visit the website here.

About MoEngage
MoEngage is an intelligent customer engagement platform, built for the mobile-first world. With AI-powered automation, optimization capabilities, and in-built analytics MoEngage enables hyper-personalization at scale across multiple channels like mobile push, email, in-app, web push, On-site messages, and SMS. Fortune 500 brands across 35+ countries such as McAfee, Samsung, and Vodafone use MoEngage to orchestrate their omnichannel campaigns.

To learn more about omnichannel user engagement with MoEngage, visit http://www.moengage.com/

*Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Mobile Marketing Platforms, Peer Contributors, 12 Nov 2019. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, Mike McGuire, Charles Golvin, 15 July 2019.  

*Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-users based on their own experiences and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Key takeaways from this year’s Gartner report include:

• Mobile technologies are ever changing. The report reflects the dynamic nature of the mobile marketing technology landscape
• An unbiased and neutral opinion of 18 vendors in the mobile marketing software category by evaluating on the completeness of its vision and its ability to execute against it.
• The strengths and cautions of 18 key industry players, including MoEngage

Download the full report!

Disclaimer: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, Mike McGuire, Charles Golvin, 15 July 2019

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the US and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner & it’s research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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MoEngage, an intelligent customer engagement platform, built for the mobile first world, has been featured in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, for the second time in a row. It is the youngest company to be featured in the report and has made the biggest leap in improvement in its position as compared to all the other vendors. You can read the complimentary copy of the report here.

In its initial years, MoEngage’s platform saw rapid adoption from mobile first startups and mid-market brands. However, as these brands grew rapidly, with some of them even becoming ‘unicorns’, MoEngage’s platform also improved to match the growing complexity and scale of their customers. Building on this momentum, MoEngage made significant investments in customer experience and product innovation. Today, MoEngage has evolved into a robust mobile marketing platform that has seen significant adoption by enterprises across Asia, the US and Europe. In the last 12 months, the company has added several large enterprise clients such as Future Retail, Deutsche Telekom, Mashreq Bank, Travelodge, Samsung and more. Enterprise clients contribute nearly 50 per cent of MoEngage’s total revenues, while mobile-first brands and ‘unicorns’ contribute the rest.

“Our progression in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and adoption by large enterprises is a testament to our investments in product innovation and customer success. Consumer brands in 35 countries trust MoEngage to power their cross-channel customer engagement campaigns to improve adoption, retention, loyalty and customer LTV. This recognition reinforces our vision to be the most trusted customer engagement platform for the mobile-first world. We place customers at the heart of everything we do and our customer obsession is reflected by not just our renewal rates, but also by the reviews on Gartner Peer Insights websites” said Raviteja Dodda, CEO and Founder, MoEngage.

Designed for the mobile-first world, MoEngage provides one dashboard through with consumer brands can analyse user behavior, engage across channels and personalize every touchpoint. Processing over 45bn user interactions and delivering over 25bn messages to 400m users every month, MoEngage is one of the fastest-growing companies in this space.

About MoEngage
MoEngage is an intelligent customer engagement platform, built for the mobile-first world. With AI-powered automation, optimization capabilities, and in-built analytics MoEngage enables hyper-personalization at scale across multiple channels like mobile push, email, in-app, web push, On-site messages, ad re-targeting, and SMS. Fortune 500 brands across 35+ countries use MoEngage to orchestrate their omnichannel campaigns. MoEngage has been featured on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for two consecutive years.

To know more visit www.moengage.com

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, Mike McGuire, Charles Golvin, 15 July 2019 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used here with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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It’s an exciting time for Airship: for the second year in a row, we’ve been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms. Even better, in the 2019 report we were placed in the highest and furthest overall position in the Leaders’ quadrant for our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The full report is available for a limited time here

It is an honour to be recognised by Gartner. We believe our incredible position in the report is further validation that Airship is the best choice for brands leading the way in customer engagement. 

We’re really on a roll here, if we do say so ourselves — and our customers (and their customers) are benefiting. The customer experiences we can power with our Customer Engagement Platform are smarter, faster and more coordinated than ever before. Highlights from the past year include…

• Gave ourselves a makeover (get details in our interactive Rebrand Journey experience) to signal the major expansion in our offerings and our powerful, centralised, enterprise-ready Customer Engagement Platform.
• Brought the Accengage team on board, massively expanding and deepening the ways we can serve brands in Europe. 
• Added support for sending messages on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and RCS messages.
• Recruited even more top talent to our leadership team, adding passionate, customer-obsessed executives who are thrilled to be creating the future of customer engagement together. 
• Dramatically advanced our SMS and email capabilities with advanced personalisation, as well as link shortening and tracking for SMS.

And the year ahead looks just as action-packed. Our Customer Engagement Platform continues to expand the ways brands can create amazing customer experiences — on any channel and at every stage of the customer journey. 

To sum up: if you’re already a customer, the report is fantastic validation that you’ve chosen the right partner. 

If you’re evaluating or re-evaluating a mobile marketing or customer engagement platform, we’d love the chance to hear more about your most ambitious goals — and show you how we can help you meet and beat them. 

Get in touch any time to chat with our experts, or schedule a personalised demo. We can’t wait to work together to build the future of customer engagement. 

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In the US and China, where the most smartphones are sold, sales fell by 15.8 per cent and 3.2 per cent respectively. These struggles can be attributed to the rising price and slowing innovation of devices leading people to feel less of a need to regularly upgrade their handset.

“Demand for premium smartphones remained lower than for basic smartphones, which affected brands such as Samsung and Apple that have significant stakes in high-end smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “In addition, demand for utility smartphones declined as the rate of upgrading from feature phones to smartphones has slowed, given that 4G feature phones give users great advantages at a lower cost.”

Samsung held on to the top spot in worldwide smartphone sales, achieving a 19.2 per cent share of the market with its 71.6m sales, according to Gartner. This marked a decline of around 7m sales and a 1.3 per cent fall in market share over the same quarter in 2018.

On the other hand, Huawei achieved a 44.5 per cent growth, reaching 58.4m units sold. This handed Huawei a 15.7 per cent market share, up from the 10.5 per cent in Q1 2018.

“Huawei did particularly well in two of its biggest regions, Europe and Greater China, where its smartphone sales grew by 69 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively,” said Gupta. “Unavailability of Google apps and services on Huawei smartphones, if implemented, will upset Huawei’s international smartphone business which is almost half of its worldwide phone business. Not the least it brings apprehension among buyers, limiting Huawei’s growth in the near term.”

Apple’s year-over-year sales dropped by nearly 10m, falling to 44.5m and giving the company an 11.9 per cent market share.

Oppo and Vivo rounded off the top five with their 7.9 and 7.3 per cent respective market shares.

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Gartner evaluated 15 mobile marketing platform vendors as part of its Critical Capabilities report, an essential companion report to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, offering a comparative analysis that scores competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators identified by Gartner. In the companys 2018 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms report, Urban Airship was named a Leader and posititioned furthest to the right in the Leaders quadrant on the completeness of vision axis overall.

“We believe Urban Airships scores in Gartners Critical Capabilities report validate the success our customers are seeing and will further accelerate our worldwide market share lead as we help even more enterprises set new standards for real-time customer experience,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president of Urban Airship. “Our open platform infuses martech stacks with real-time behavioural data, multi-channel orchestration and machine learning that are critical for marketers to both understand new customer expectations and to take immediate and relevant action in order to exceed them.”

According to Gartner L2, mobile interactions accounted for 67 per cent of all brand site traffic in 2017. The Critical Capabilities report states, “mobile marketing platform vendors are addressing this rapid uptick in mobile engagement demands by offering capabilities like improved real-time and event-triggered capabilities, enhanced data protection modules, stronger integrations and third-party partnerships, and AI-driven analytics capabilities.”

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Martech accounted for 29 per cent of total marketing budget in 2018, compared to 22 per cent last year, according to a Gartner survey of 621 marketing executives in North America and the UK. This growth makes martech the largest area of investment for marketing resources and programs, while labour budgets fell from 28 per cent in 2017 to 24 per cent in 2018.

Despite this, Gartner doesn’t believe that this budget shift is necessarily a reflection of how automation is replacing humans within marketing.

“While many may be quick to relate this to the start of automation reducing human capital requirements, our analysis suggests this shift in marketing spend is a result of organisations dealing with capabilities, resources and talent in increasingly complex ways,” said Ewan McIntyre, senior research director at Gartner.

The top areas where chief marketing officers (CMOs) are investing their tech budgets were found to be email marketing, online content management, and digital analytics technology, while artificial intelligence could see an increase in investment to design marketing campaigns in the future – 14 per cent of marketing budgets now going toward personalisation.

Elsewhere, 23 per cent of budgets will be handed over to external agencies and paid media spend respectively this year, both falling from 25 per cent in 2017.

Meanwhile, one in every six marketing dollars is now spent on innovation-related initiatives, and 63 per cent of CMOs expect budget to increase in this area in 2019.

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Almost 384m smartphones were sold in Q1 2018, a 1.3 per cent increase over the same period in 2017, according to Gartner. On the other hand, total mobile phone sales stalled in reaching 455m units sold.

“Demand for premium and high-end smartphones continued to suffer due to marginal incremental benefits during upgrade,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “Demand for entry-level smartphones and low mid-tier smartphones improved due to better-quality models.”

Samsung comfortably remained out in front, despite seeing its market share fall slightly to 20.5 per cent, with 78.5m units sold in Q1 2018. Apple’s market share grew to 14.1 per cent but remained a distant second with its 54m units sold. The ‘big two’ were followed by the Chinese trio of Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo – selling 40.5m, 28.5m, and 28m units respectively. The rest accounted for 154m units between them.

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