Smartphone marketing...to leak or not to leak...

[Guest Westy2004]

Afternoon all

I have an SPV E200 and look in at these forums from time to time to see what's new.

It suddenly occured to me that you guys would be the perfect people to ask about a piece of research I'm doing at the moment regarding viral marketing. I'm looking for instances where handset manufacturers and/or service providers deliberately "leak" information about forchcoming products, specifications, services or even actual demo products etc to interested parties e.g. newsgroups or forums like this, in the knowledge that this "taster" will generate lots of discussion and hence "viral" dissemination of the piece of information. This in turn stimulates lots of interest in the product when it does finally appear. This seems to be a ploy that Orange "may" have used with the various generations of SPV.

Would anyone have any comment on this or be able to provide other examples of this in practice? I've heard that O2 may do something similar with the XDA?

Sorry for this not being directly phone related, but it struck me that people in here would probably be the best placed to pass comment on it. (I'm also posting this to a couple of the newsgroups for the same reason).

Thanks in advance for your comments.

All the best & kind regards

Westy

[Guest AngelOfRage]

i think it can swing both ways tbh. if they release a bit of info that doesn't sound very good then people might be put off and not bother looking into it again.

just my 2 pence worth...

[Guest Lady Marmalade]

Hi,

I think it happens by accident rather than by design.

I know how hard it can be to get information on new products before they're launched!

Lady M.