At a time when cell phones are letting users do more tricks, from video calling to downloading digital music, one of the latest models from Vodafone Group PLC has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.
What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That’s because of who its market is: people getting up in years.
If the battery on the Vodafone Simply, as it’s called, gets low, the phone doesn’t signal this with a tiny icon somewhere. Instead, on its screen, the words “please charge” appear. If a message is waiting, a light flashes, like in old-fashioned answering machines. To help people who tend to lose their phones around the house and let the battery run down, this one comes with a stand that serves as a place to stow the thing, and charges it while it’s there.
Ann Ridley is the kind of customer Vodafone has in mind. A 65-year-old ballet teacher in Claygate, England, near London, Ridley rarely gives out her mobile-phone number, never uses text messaging and doesn’t store her friends’ numbers on the phone.
“I can’t see the numbers, and it’s too complicated,” she says. The result is that she uses the cell phone for fewer than a dozen calls a year, spending less than $18 annually.
The hope at Vodafone is that when people such as Ridley, who said she wasn’t familiar with the Vodafone Simply, hear about it, they’ll find its ease of use so comforting they’ll start to use their cell service more. If so, Vodafone, which collects a fee for each cell-phone call, can expect more revenue.
Vodafone isn’t the only company – nor cell phones the only industry – trying to shape some products for older consumers or to simplify them. At Ford Motor Co., designers who test-drive prototypes sometimes wear a “third-age” suit that gives them a sense of an older person’s experience by means of stiff fabric at the elbows and knees and thick padding at the waist.
Ford has made many modifications to cars as a result, from wider doors to more-comfortable seats, says one of its technical specialists, Jeffrey Pike.
Philips Electronics NV, whose many products range from beard trimmers to X-ray systems, has a “Simplicity Advisory Board” of outside experts, and next month will bring out the first products of a companywide simplicity drive. Consumers are saying, “Many products complicate my life instead of making it easier,” says the head of Philips’s global marketing management, Enderson Guimaraes.
The Vodafone Simply isn’t an attempt to match certain ultra-simple phones sold to the elderly for emergency use, such as one from a France Telecom SA unit that has no keyboard but just three big color-coded buttons linked to preprogrammed numbers such as that of a doctor. Instead, Vodafone is trying to appeal to a large market of middle-aged and older people with a handset they won’t find intimidating. The company’s European target market is everyone who’s 40 years of age or over and isn’t issued a cell phone by an employer.
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