Quit kidding around

Market research recently released by Statistics Norway and Norwegian provider Telenor offers a remarkable bit of data: Fully 100% of Norwegian teens between the ages of 16 and 19 polled for the survey own a mobile phone. For respondents aged 13 to 15, wireless phone penetration is at 95%, and for respondents aged 20 to 24, the number is at 99%.

Those are staggering statistics no matter how you look at them, and if cultural indicators prove correct, that kind of saturation is bound to happen in the U.S. someday as well.

But while it's encouraging that North American carriers seem like they're finally learning how to sell wireless services to teens and that youth-targeted applications like text messaging and ringtones are beginning to find a commercial foothold, there's real danger in banking too heavily on young subscribers as the cornerstone of a marketplace. At the risk of sounding like the cranky old man who yells at the neighborhood kids to get the hell off his lawn, the youth market is mercurial and unreliable — after all, if the wireless carrier establishment really understood and trusted younger subscribers, then prepaid, teen-targeted MVNOs would have no reason for being.

The real money is still in the enterprise market — the over-25 geezers who don't care about the latest and greatest ringtones but simply want the kind of services and applications that enable them to do their jobs each day. They're not glamorous and they're not sexy — in Norway, some of ‘em don't even own cell phones — but they are still this industry's bread and butter.

Best of all, they're people like you and me, meaning that sometimes, conducting market research can be as simple as looking in a mirror.