Mobile marketing is expected to be the next big thing for most marketers, with 100 million smartphones in the U.S. expected to be active by by the end of 2011. It’s not just the power of these devices but the context that they deliver that’s important for marketers to consider.
Too many apps built today treat the smartphone as a little PC, writes Josh Bernoff. That’s the wrong way to think about it. Mobile experiences make up for their interface limitations with knowledge. When a phone knows where you are, what you’re doing, your identity and history, and even potentially your attitudes — based on what you’ve done in the past year and the past five minutes — it can help predict and deliver what you want right now. This is the context that makes mobile devices more intimate and completely different from traditional web experiences.
Elements like built in GPS, accelerometers and high-res displays will be standard in all phones pretty soon. Keeping this in mind, it will be important to deliver greater functionality, use data presented to you and use the technology to its greatest effect.
Where you are on this path depends on your company, said Bernoff. If you’re competing by differentiating, have retail locations, or work in mobile-forward industries like gaming and media, you must move aggressively to deliver these new levels of mobile experience — your customers will demand it, and your competitors are already working to deliver it. If you compete based on cost in a slower-moving industry like insurance or business services, start with stage 1 and know where you’re headed. Focus on your consumers’ pain points and behavior, not just on what information you can fling into a mobile app. But failing to get on this path — or failing to notice it at all — is a big mistakes right now. Mobile is the future of interactivity — you’d better prepare for the future of mobile.
Source: AdAge.com
