iPhone Screen Size: Might Apple Have Been Asking The Wrong Market-Research Questions?

This article is by Rob Tanner, assistant professor of marketing for the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The iPhone continues to be an unambiguous smash hit product, especially in North America. But Android-powered smartphones, notably those from Samsung, have become a vibrant and dangerous competitor. While the phones are ultimately similar on many dimensions, screen size has become an ever-increasing differentiator. While the screen size of Android phones seem to grow on an almost daily basis, the iPhone has increased in size only once during its life, and remains considerably smaller (and especially narrower, likely to facilitate one -handed use) than its plethora of Android rivals.

With the imminent release of the iPhone 5S seeming unlikely to bring an increase in screen size, Apple fans seem likely to face another year being dwarfed by their Android-toting rivals. With a significant body of high-end smartphone consumers seeming to genuinely favor larger screens, Apple’s apparent reticence to offer a more sizable iPhone is becoming ever more puzzling with each passing hardware refresh. While there are likely many underlying reasons for this, such as resolution fragmentation and the availability of sufficiently high-quality screens in the huge volume Apple requires, Tim Cook has mentioned usability (and specifically “not sacrificing one-handed use”) on multiple occasions. Given his oft-cited love of data, I have no doubt Apple has done a tremendous about of usability testing suggesting the current iPhone screen size is in many ways optimal from a usage perspective. However, Apple would certainly not be the first highly skilled marketer to overweight a particular aspect of their market research.

Perhaps the most famous example of a consumer-facing market research failure was the disastrous launch of New Coke in 1985. While Coca-Cola did extensive taste-testing revealing that New Coke was substantially preferred to the old formulation, when the product hit the market it was met with a fanfare of disapproval that lead ultimately to a humiliating reinstatement of the prior formulation. This leads to an obvious question: Why, if the new formulation had performed so well in taste-testing, did the actual launch fare so badly? The answer is that Coke essentially asked the wrong questions of their research participants. Because the tasting was blind, tasters had no idea that one of the beverages they tasted was actual Coca-Cola, and one an upstart new formulation. Had the cups been branded at the time of tasting, the results would likely have been very different as the tasters would then have been influenced by their love of what may be the world's most powerful and evocative brand. Essentially, by primarily focusing on blind tasting, Coke ultimately asked the wrong questions of their tasters.

Fast-forward to the iPhone, and the potential for a somewhat similar situation is striking. Cook and Apple have been borderline

stubborn in their defense of the iPhone’s screen size, which suggests they have a wealth of research to back up their position. Certainly, I have little doubt that an iPhone 5 would perform better in usability testing than would a prototype iPhone with a 5-inch screen. However, in Best Buy , or on Amazon, few consumers mimic this degree of testing. All else equal, they buy quickly with their eyes, not after extensive one-handed research with their thumbs. The reality is that for many consumers big screens are proving to have more immediate allure at the point of sale. The possibility thus exists that in their desire to engineer the perfect product for the customer, Apple may nonetheless have built the wrong product for a large segment of the market. If this is the case, then such a failure must ultimately be partially a reflection of Apple’s market research, raising the possibility that they may have been asking the wrong questions.