TomTom's MD Corinne Vigreux has explained how the sat-nav giant expects to take on the free offerings from the likes of Google and Apple and remain a major player.
Vigreux, speaking at IFA 2012, told TechRadar that the philosophy of TomTom is to be platform agnostic and that, even up against free products, people are prepared to pay for the best experience.
TomTom has announced that it will be launching offline maps for its Android app this week, which will make it a viable option for a huge audience of Android device owners.
Freefall
"It's interesting because we are going to be competing with free which is always difficult," said Vigreux.
"We won't be free but what we see is that navigation is so important everyone want it one way or another
"Once you've tasted navigation you don't go back, but a bad navigation experience puts you off so people realise to get a good experience it's worth spending a bit of money.
"That's what we expect to see from consumers: they will think TomTom is a good brand, it's safe, it has the best maps, fantastic traffic, the route is great so I spend less time on the road, I'm less stressed and I know what time I will arrive."
Logical migration
Vigreux explained that Android was a logical migration for the company, following its success on Apple's iOS.
"The philosophy is that we want to be device agnostic," she added. "A lot of the intelligence is what is in the box, it's not the box itself.
"We try to make the box as nice and efficient as possible with a big screen, speakers and dedicated to navigation but we know that there is a part of the market that is quite happy to use it on their phone and we want them to have the same good experience on their mobile device as they do on their PND [Personal Navigation Device].
"The two big operating systems on devices are Android and iOS so that's why we decided to go for android. It's a huge market."
