For most of us, Christmas is still a long way off and something that can be happily ignored until December, but for marketers and retailers Christmas planning sessions are already in full swing. Two of the biggest products which are going to be filling stockings this Christmas are Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle.

We’ve blogged previously about the Kindle and how it dominates the ebook space, but many would argue that Amazon’s real competition in this space is the iPad. Around this time last year when the Kindle 3 was launched, there were four times as many searches for iPads as there were for Kindles. Looking at the latest search data iPad is still the more popular product but the gap has narrowed between the two.

Both Kindle and iPad saw a 40% increase in searches in the busy post-Christmas period around Boxing Day and 27 December 2010. Searches for iPads also increased dramatically in the first week of March 2011 when the iPad 2 was launched. However, after the launch of the iPad 2 searches have flattened out and now iPad consistently receives twice as much search volume as the Kindle.

What’s interesting to look at is to see the overlap in searches for both gadgets. Looking at all the searches for iPad and Kindle for the 12 weeks ending 30 July 2011, 65% of people searched exclusively for iPad, 27% searched exclusively for Kindle and 8% of people searched for both iPad and Kindle.
To look at the data another way: of all of the people that searched for an iPad during the 12 week period, 22% also searched for a Kindle, whereas of all the people that searched for a Kindle, 10% also searched for an iPad. This core 8% demographic of people searching for both iPad and Kindle is an intense fighting ground for Apple and Amazon to win over new customers. Using Mosaic we can see the three groups of people that are strongly represented in this middle ground are Alpha Territory (60% more likely than the average Internet user to search for iPads and Kindles), Professional Rewards (15% more likely) and Liberal Opinions (21% more likely), three very affluent groups that are tech savvy and have a lot of disposable income to spend on gadgets.
We will be exploring the audience analysis of the iPad and Kindle in a lot more detail in tomorrow’s retail webinar which is free to sign up for and takes place at noon. We will also be giving our top tips for retailers to plan for Christmas this year, so this is a must-see session for anyone working in the online retail space. In the meantime you can always follow us on Twitter for the latest retail updates and data insights.