In this morning’s “The Mobile Revolution,” shopkick’s Cyriac Roeding gave attendees a quick history of where mobile marketing has been … and a great overview of where it’s headed. Gone are the days when mobile marketers could only offer texting promotions to customers. Now, mobile phones are ubiquitous globally and the only interactive tool that we, as consumers, carry around all the time into the offline world. Here’s a quick roundup of takeaways from the session:
- The mobile revolution already arrived. Specifically, Roeding says, it arrived in July 2008. So retailers and marketers need to think about the ways in which they engage with consumers via mobile. Consumers want more than just texting and talking. Now they want to conduct Web searches, use mobile video, explore social networking, and more.
Cyriac Roeding
- Mobile is not just a small TV or PC. Mobile offers so many additional opportunities, such as entertainment, peer-to-peer communication, personalization and context. Mobile is the only one of these mediums that can interpret and use time of day and location.
- The future of online is offline. In other words, marketers and retailers need to focus on the deep integration of mobile and the physical world. Consumers carry mobile devices into non-interactive environments. Mobile is immediate. Mobile can serve as the glue between the physical and interactive worlds.
What’s on the horizon for mobile? Retailers and marketers need to use mobile to drive foot traffic, increase basket size and margins, improve quality and efficiency, and help build customer frequency. During the session, shopkick announced a new partnership with P&G that will help them to accomplish all of these things. Consumers will be able to earn “karma points” (that can be donated to preferred charities via a mobile app) simply by scanning the bar code of an item in the store. Consumers don’t even have to purchase the product, they just need to scan the code into the mobile app. This represents one of the first steps marketers are taking to integrate mobile and bricks-and-mortar stores.
Roeding ended on an exciting note: “Mobile is the key to cross-channel integration in retail.” So stop waiting for the mobile revolution! It’s here already and we need to focus on new ways to explore this medium.
2 Comments
It is definitely interesting to see how different brands/agencies/etc are approaching the cross-channel issue. It’s certainly not as simple as taking the same message and pasting it into different places. But from a content management standpoint there is a real need for standardization.
ThisMoment is offering a system that manages content across Facebook, Twitter, mobile and others. There was an article in AdAge about the channel they did for the movie Kick-Ass. Here’s the site: http://kickass.thismoment.com/
Anyway, interesting stuff. And definitely a topic to watch. Thanks for the post.
–Ben
I think the mobile is a very powerful way to market to your audience. Not only do you have the social media avenue to target, there are peer to peer communication and entertainment areas to look at as the post rightly mentioned.
Mobile marketing in my opinion is all about personalization, getting the right message across at the right time, more so than desktop browsing. With mobile browsing the user is generally ready take action and is not looking to research all that much.
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