Recently, popular international websites such as Wired, Wall Street Journal and some popular websites in The Netherlands such as Nu.nl and Tweakers.net published polls to ask their readers whether they would buy the iPad or not.

The polls showed some interesting mixed results between wanna-buyers and don’t-wanna-buyers. At SusaGroup, this made us decide to see how emotion was involved in their opinion about iPad.

We let iPad battle it out versus iPhone, an already established and highly popular and engaging Apple product. A small group of people was asked to evaluate their emotional experience with the products using PrEmo, our emotion measurement instrument.

The results

Overall, both products elicited mainly positive emotions.

iPad is supposed to be the latest and hottest item from Apple, but the product didn’t win from iPhone as far as desirability, joy, satisfaction and pride were concerned. Fascination did score considerably higher for iPad.

Our explanation for this is that iPad is a fascinating product, but is perhaps too similar (in experience) to iPhone to really elicit stronger feelings of desire. This is underlined by the fact that people are very satisfied with the iPhone and apparently don’t see the need for another product that (from the consumer’s point of view) has the same or similar product experience. Comments such as “It is a big iPhone” that have been made by many perfectly illustrate this.

People know and love the iPhone. Inspite of some new interestig features, the iPad fails to deliver a new emotional experience that the iPhone did when it was launched.

We call out the (preliminary) winner: iPhone!

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