Yankee Group today announced additional results of its 2005 Technologically Advanced Family (TAF) Survey, which reveals crucial consumer voice data and analysis for industry players wishing to capture the buying power of early adopter consumers, as well as mass market, late mass market and laggard market segments.



Key survey findings include:

• The VoIP market remains immature. Despite some gains, consumer awareness of the technology is low and confusion remains high. Nearly 35% of VoIP-aware US households do not believe that VoIP is a telephone service that can be used with a regular telephone.
• In 2005, about 38% of VoIP-aware households believe that VoIP telephony provided a better feature set than traditional telephone service representing an increase of 15% since 2004.

Customer confusion is driven in part by the different positioning strategies of the VoIP providers. For instance, cable companies are positioning their VoIP telephony service as the same as regular phone service which diminishes the need for awareness as a prerequisite to adoption.

"The traditional new product adoption curve is broken with VoIP telephone service," said Kate Griffin, Yankee Group, program manager, Consumer Technologies & Services. "Traditionally, new technology products educate and build awareness in the early adopter segments of the market, and then progress incrementally toward less technologically advanced segments. VoIP is simultaneously being marketed as a traditional phone product with mass-market appeal and as a new and different VoIP product with appeal to more price-sensitive and tech-savvy segments."

Although the growth of broadband has helped to increase awareness of VoIP, significant adoption obstacles still exist including customer inertia and the lack of a compelling reason to adopt the technology. The TAF survey revealed that although price continues to be the strongest message, providers' attempts to expand the value discussion beyond price to incorporate VoIP's enhanced feature set are starting to show some positive effect.

Now in its twentieth year, the Yankee Group TAF Survey evaluates adoption, buying behaviors and purchasing influencers of households across all demographic segments in the US to help vendors, carriers, service providers and retailers build strategies to gain a larger share of US consumer spending on technology products and services. Applying proprietary Yankee Group methodology and drawing from a cross-sample of more than 2,300 US households, the survey measures consumer attitudes about hundreds of products and companies in such areas as internet, voice and telephony services, media and entertainment, online billing and home computing.