Kenyans turn to mobile phones for entertainment services

Kenyans are now turning to mobile phones as their central entertainment platform, a recent report by TNS technology has said.

The report states that the demand for music, social video like YouTube and maps is high among the Kenyan consumers.

The TNS Global Director Rapid Growth and Emerging Markets, James Fergusson says Kenyan consumers are largely using phones for entertainment.

“We have moved beyond communication and the priority for consumers is getting more and better content into their phones,” he says.

The trend of turning mobile phones into entertainment platform is not only taking place in Kenya.

Fergusson says consumers in the Emerging Markets are using their mobile phones for entertainment services more often through the day showing a greater alignment of the services to day-to-day life.

“Greater utility of mobile services means that there are more opportunities in the African market to actually touch consumers and influence their behaviour,” he says.

He says key to making the most out of the mobile phones, is to make information relevant to consumers.

“To understand relevance, you must understand context. This is to show that to maximize the phone as a channel, you need to understand the context of the consumer hence where they are, who they are with, and what they are doing will define their behaviours,” he says.

According to Fergusson, different services relate to different contexts. Music is useful during the morning when you are about to wake up or looking to navigate the noisy commute.

SMS is ubiquitous as it is the primary communication form for many consumers.

Social networking is used in evenings when people are sociable with the most preferred time being when in bed before sleeping.

“Thinking from an advertiser’s perspective, if you are promoting breakfast cereal, then perhaps music is your ideal partner. If you want to promote a nightclub – social networking bands will be the best,” says Fergusson.

Fergusson says consumers get the most value from the services that deliver the greatest utility.

According to TNS report, Kenyans spend 38 of their time listening to radio through phones compared to 25 per cent spend by the African population and 23 per cent by the global market hence mobile radio accounts for substantial usage in Kenya.

The other impact of greater utility is that consumers are more open to paying for the content themselves, especially younger consumers.

Incremental pricing models are thus popular as it gives consumers the flexibility to ramp up or ramp down their spending when they want to.

However, to make people actually part with their money, Fergusson says one should offer them something that they cannot get through free means for instance side loading from other mobiles.

Majority of the Kenyans prefer paying for mobile music through pay fixed price for each download which stands at 44 per cent.

About 17 per cent use pay fixed price for bundle accounts, 12 per cent unlimited usage as part of monthly plan, while 27 per cent would not pay to download music.

The demand shift coupled with the current faster and cheap broadband as well as the falling prices of smartphones is likely to accelerate growth of the Value-Added Services (VAS) market as customers demand a range of services.

Having been in the VAS market for the last six years, the Cellulant CEO, Ken Njoroge says there is a lot of potential in the segment.

“The size of value added services is estimated at 10 per cent of telecom revenues globally; this would put VAS market in Kenya at approximately Ksh 1.1 billion. Njoroge says music downloads via mobile phones is a US dollar 4 million Internet business opportunity.

Currently, the cost of downloading a track in Kenya ranges from Ksh 50-70 (US dollar 64-89 cents) and in Nigeria it’s about the same at around N100 a track (US dollar 66 cents).