A Missed Marketing Opportunity: Free iPhone Apps

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 11, 2008

From intern Jay Yarow:

Dear Corporations,

You just missed a huge marketing opportunity. Smallware, a company that specializes in making solitaire and puzzle games for Windows, Mac and Palm OS, released a free version of its iPhone solitaire game last Thursday. That game now sits atop the free download rankings of the iTunes App Store. That could mean more than 80,000 people are downloading this game every day. And rather than look at your logo, dear corporations, they’re looking at nothing.

Before Smallware introduced the free solitaire application, there was only one free solitaire app, which had bad reviews. Solitaire is a game people are used to getting for free with their PCs. Any company that had released a branded version of Solitaire before August 7th would have had it’s name at the top of the download list.

In a story today, I profile a pair of developers who started designing games for free for jailbroken iPhones. Soon after the App store opened they introduced a free game with Carling beer as the primary sponsor. They’re working on two other games for other companies now. While the theme of that story is how developers can make money giving away their games, a bigger theme is how companies can use the App Store to push their brand.

Carl Loodberg, one of the developers from the story, said his Labyrinth game is launched 330,000 times a day by iPhone users. Imagine how often the new solitaire application must be started each day. While the iPhone is a limited market, it provides an excellent marketing opportunity. Develop fun, free, branded applications and maybe you can get half a million consumers thinking about your company in a positive way every time they look at their phone.

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