Skip to main content

What Will 2011 Mean for Mobile Marketing

Well, another new year is almost upon us.  Before I talk about what I and some of my peers in the industry think 2011 will bring for Mobile Marketing, I just want to briefly summarise 2010.

For me, 2010 was the coming of age for Mobile Marketing.  I remember back in my BT days, as early as 2002, when we were developing strategies for mobile marketing based on advice from the soothsayers that are industry analysts who claimed mobile data and the services it enabled were the next big thing.  It's taken the mobile marketing industry significantly longer to establish itself (short battery life, small unusable screens and GPRS reliability and cost being the main barriers), being limited mainly to SMS marketing and even then this was dominated by would be SPAMmers.  However, I think Apple deserves a big pat on the back for taking the plunge and convincing the critical mass that touch-screens and apps were the thing to be doing on your mobile - "what?! You want to talk to someone with it!!!"...  Not happy with this, Apple brought out the iPad which, for me, really merges the gap between using mobile apps at home and on the move.  Since I got mine, the laptop hasn't been fired up.  The iMac does the word processing and power and (giant) screen hungry tasks, the iPad does the casual browsing stuff.  Who wants to wait for Windows to do its stuff before they can find out whether it's going to snow some more?  And what a waste of space the keyboard is when you can have a touch-sensitive screen...  Well done Apple for having the balls to launch the technology.  Looking forward to Google, Samsung and the others making touchpads and smartphones affordable for the masses (and pushing Apple to continue enhancing the iPad and iPhone to keep the competition at bay).  Finally, barcode marketing via mobile phones has finally started to emerge as a viable alternative to paper vouchers and coupons.  Strangely it's not the technology that's advanced really, but the user acceptance that mobile vouchering is safe and convenient.  Only downside for me was the false start that was Contactless transactions, using NFC technology.  Barclaycard did its best trying to get us excited about the possibility, but the arguments about ownership amongst the banks, networks, device manufacturers and card issuers has stalled this advancement.  Maybe we'll see a change in 2011 triggered by the intentions of Google who have included NFC technology in their latest Smartphone.


So, 2010 brought about the mobile revolution we've all been waiting for and I really believe 2011 will be a phenomenal year for anyone in the industry, particularly those of us passionate about mobile marketing.


I'm going to keep you in suspense a little longer and will reveal my thoughts on this closer to the New Year, but as a quick overview and introduction, here's what I think will be the biggies:


  1. Smartphones will become relatively cheap making them the phone of choice and they'll be offered "free" as part of network contract bundles
  2. The networks will continue to panic about GPRS and 3G network capacity with the situation being made worse by the continued growth in use of mobile apps on Smartphones and pads.  Wifi will come to the rescue and companies like BT Openzone will be kicking themselves for being market leaders (remember, the followers are normally the ones that make the money)...
  3. Mobile marketing will become the norm with barcode vouchers leading the way.  There'll be some issues with spamming, similar to what we've now got with email marketing.
  4. Every brand, every business will have a mobile app.
  5. The snailmail (letters) logistics industry will start to see real impact on their bottom lines from mobile messaging substitution.  However, they'll make up the shortfall from all those Smartphones and iPad deliveries they'll need to make!
  6. Mobile payments will start to appear with the banks getting closely involved.
  7. Location based services will be prolific and every mobile app will be location driven, delivering the right content in the right way depending on where you are and what you're likely to be doing at the time. 
  8. England will lose out on the rights to host the next World Tea Drinking Championships with the Maldives winning the rights to host the competition...  Some things never change afterall.



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are Mobile Payments About to Become a Reality?

With the announcement that US Carriers have formed an alliance to deliver Mobile Payments and a similar deal taking place in Germany, is cash finally entering it's death throes? The news is that US carriers AT&T,T-Mobile and Verizon have joined forced to develop a nationwide mCommerce network that will utilise technologies such as NFC and Smartphone devices to allow payments to be made by swishing a mobile phone close to a payments receiver.  Think of the Barclaycard ads where they guy flies down the waterslide on his daily commute home and pauses ever so briefly to pass his bit of plastic over a sensor to pay for a banana he had a sudden craving for.  This is the same thing except you will wave your phone and not have to carry another bit of plastic around with you. The benefit of phone over plastic in this case is the richer interface.  The phone can act as a vessel in which to store financial information, such as the credentials for several credit cards or othe...
2 comments
Read more

Contactless Payments - Should I Throw Way My Plastic

I shall apologies in advance for a bit of a ramble in this week's post as it's based on an email conversation I've been having with a guy called Manju who got in touch via my Linkedin .com page. It's about contactless payments which utilises Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies. For those of you that aren't up to speed on NFC I'll explain what it is in a second (actually I've c&pd from Wikipedia). For those who know it inside and out you may want to skip a few paragraphs... Essentially, NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre (around 4 inches) distance (although my own tests suggests this is often more like 2 cms ). The technology is a simple extension of the ISO/ IEC 14443 proximity-card standard (as used in RFID ) that combines the interface of a smartcard and a reader into a single device. One of the real advantages of NFC is tha...
2 comments
Read more

Mobile Marketing - What is It?

Any company selling goods and services to consumers or other businesses should become savvy in the practice of Mobile Marketing. It’s one of many marketing channels that have been around for sometime, but until now it’s been in the shadows of the mainstream mass media channels such as TV, Direct Marketing and, more recently, Online Marketing. However, according to Gartner, the number of people using the Mobile Web to find content on the Internet will, in 2010, surpasses those using a web browser on a PC. There are already over 3 billion mobile phone users in the world and in increasingly more countries, penetration exceeds 100% (as some have more than one phone). The fact is, thanks to advancing technology and ever reducing mobile data network prices, the mobile as a channel has matured and any brand ignoring the marketing value of this channel will start to fall behind its more adventurous competitors. (Dushinski) What is Mobile Marketing all about? One thing is certain, Mobile Marke...
2 comments
Read more