Dumphones & Culture in the Digital Age
Some call them dumphones, feature phones, or to others, minimalist phones. Some are tiny, others about the usual size of today’s smartphone. Some really are limited while others do enable email and calendar access, much like the early Blackberry’s in the 00’s. None enable social media apps. Most are black & white or eInk. Sales are increasing. What’s going on?
While the biggest demographic for dumphone buyers today is Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), some Gen Xers are increasingly interested and Millennials (1981–1996) are finding them more attractive. That there is such multigenerational interest suggests a macro cultural shift in how we want mobile devices to adapt to us after we adapted to them.
Feature phones (dumphones) in 2022 saw sales largely in African and Middle Eastern countries, but sales are increasing in the USA, so probably in other Western countries. Influencers on YouTube are pushing feature phones as well.
This presents new opportunities for mobile innovations and marketers. It is suggestive of consumer behavioural shifts. One we are already seeing as consumer use of social media is shifting from using social media to be, well, social, to using it as entertainment. Actual socializing activities are moving to messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessenger and DMs (Direct Messaging) in apps like Twitter (X)…
