U.S. Kids Continue to Look Forward to “iHoliday”
When it comes to devices, kids' holiday wish lists are simple this year. The most-wanted gifts are predominantly from one company—Apple. According to a recent Nielsen study, Apple's popularity leading up to the holiday season continues …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen's finding that Apple dominates U.S. kids' holiday wish lists extends a pattern the firm itself documented back in 2008, when its survey showed Apple dominating the teen vote — meaning this is at least the second consecutive election cycle of American youth where one company owns the gift list. The pickup across Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, MacRumors and other outlets within a day shows how much weight retailers and investors put on these wish-list surveys as a read on the holiday quarter.
The story lands amid a cluster of confirmed Apple datapoints from mid-November 2012: Apple Stores generating higher sales per square foot than Tiffany's with an average customer spend of $45 per visit, a trial storefront opened on eBay, and an escalating patent campaign against Samsung and Google's Android camp. The wish-list data is the demand-side mirror of that supply-side positioning.
First-order effects
- Holiday-quarter demand is concentrating on a single vendor: parents and gift-buyers face a wish list that is predominantly Apple, funneling peak-season spending toward iPads, iPods and iPhones rather than split across brands.
- Apple's retail network enters the holidays as the industry's highest-traffic destination per square foot, so the wish-list skew compounds directly into store-level sales during the busiest weeks of the year.
Second-order effects
- Rivals named in Apple's own litigation — Samsung and Google's Android backers — must compete for young buyers on price and product breadth while simultaneously fighting Apple's expanded infringement claims against the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S III, constraining how aggressively they can market the alternatives.
- Channel experiments like Apple's new eBay storefront signal the company meeting wish-list demand wherever it originates, pressuring traditional electronics retailers on whose turf the holiday sale is closed.
Third-order effects
- If childhood wish-list dominance persists across successive survey cycles, it functions as an early lock-in mechanism: brand preferences formed by age ten plausibly persist into adult purchasing, making youth surveys a leading indicator of long-run smartphone and tablet share.
- Wish-list studies themselves are becoming an institutionalized part of the holiday news cycle — a recurring dataset that retailers, investors and competitors treat as a forecast, giving firms like Nielsen agenda-setting power over which companies appear 'winning' before a single unit is sold.
The trend: Annual holiday device surveys are hardening into a barometer of consumer-tech market share, and they consistently show Apple converting young users into the next generation of ecosystem customers.