Livewire

Marketing and advertising has been an essential form of communication through which Consumer-focused enterprises educate and create awareness amongst their consumers. Traditionally, they had been using Print, Direct Mailers and Billboard displays until the dawn of Internet. The mass adoption of Internet and the Web 2.0 era resulted in these companies increasing the share of their Ad-spend on Online based Marketing & Advertising campaigns.

Today, mobile is the king! There is no other mass media like Mobile that has a ubiquitous presence amongst consumers. Consumer-focused enterprises have increased their focus on Mobile as a channel to reach out to their consumers through effective Marketing Campaigns. But Mobile Marketing still has not reached its tipping point due to various reasons.

Why hasn’t Mobile Marketing ticked yet with the Consumer-focused Companies? With the current economic climate, companies will want to make sure their marketing dollars yield the expected RoI with maximum reach. We see that they are sticking to their time-tested marketing channels. So far Mobile Marketing meant push-based SMS marketing or pull based Banner inserts into Applications and Mobile Sites (an imitation of the Online Marketing/Advertising strategy). This strategy, though may reach masses, may not really work for the Mobile channel. A mobile phone, being a personal device, is all about relevance and context. If the consumer receives a marketing message relating to what he wants to see, when he wants to see and where he wants to see, I am sure the consumer is going to respond to it.

• There is no other marketing channel than can be a direct response channel like the Mobile. The interactivity it can drive by enabling consumers to respond to the marketing messages is by far one of the biggest advantages of Mobile channel.
• In these rough economic conditions, consumers are always looking for ways to save money and they always want to save time and be smart. Mobile as a marketing & advertising channel can easily enable companies to offer something of value and relevance to the consumers and provide it to them when they need it wherever they happen to be.
• Mobile Marketing is simply beyond push-based information (thru Ad Banners and SMSes). It can be an effective tool to - Collect information about the consumers (Ex: Through Text to Win campaigns, marketers can collect information anything from Zip Code to Age); Provide simple (but relevant information) to the consumers (Ex: Mobile-optimized sites providing product information, Deal information etc); Drive Interactivity (Ex: Click to make a Call to the Care/Sales agent, Click to get the nearest location, click to download some goodies etc).
• The Mobile Marketing channel offers a variety of delivery channels for the marketing communications and the marketers have the flexibility of choosing the channel (or a combination of channels) they want to use to reach out to the consumers on the basis of what is effective, relevant and that which makes economic-sense to them. Some mobile marketing delivery approaches like “proximity marketing” (Thanks to WiFi and Bluetooth!!) do not require the end user to spend a dime and hence they are even more likely to be adopted by your mobile audience.

What is in it for Operators? I believe Mobile Operators play a very vital role in making Mobile Marketing and Advertising a successful ecosystem which creates value not only for the Consumer-focused enterprises and their consumers but for themselves by means of a new revenue stream. The relevance (may be it user relevance, location relevance or context relevance) can be more effectively provided only by the Operator. The effectiveness of this relevance goes a long way in determining the success of a Mobile Marketing campaign for a marketer and also determines a consumer’s responsiveness to such a campaign. Mobile Marketing can become a new revenue generating tool for the Operators and enable them to offer a new enterprise service because most of the Operator’s customers are customers of those Enterprises too!

While a number of brands and companies have made investments in mobile as a marketing tool, they still remain an exception in this whole new ecosystem. I believe most of the enterprises and brands (not to mention the Operators themselves) are not yet convinced about the potential that mobile as a marketing channel holds.

What do you think are the major reason for why Mobile Marketing has not yet ticked?  

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been sharing a lot my thoughts on innovations and market trends in the Wireless Applications space. In my last blog on Enterprise Mobility, I tried to describe my thoughts on the next of wave opportunities for businesses and brands. For once, I wanted to take a step back and share with you my questions for which I would like to hear your thoughts.

Enterprise Mobility market has been traditionally associated with applications/solutions like Field Force Automation and Mobile Point of Sale. Enterprise Mobility started out as productivity improvement tools that invaded our lives in the forms of mobile phones and Blackberries, dramatically extending work days and globalizing work. How have operators played in these markets other than providing the network access and devices. MNOs are now offering a wide range of hosted mobility solutions to their enterprise customers like providing remote access, Device Mgmt, Unified messaging, audio conferencing, instant messaging etc. While these are technical solutions that focus primarily on the productivity aspects of an Enterprise, can an Operator help drive revenues for their enterprise customers thereby creating a revenue opportunity for themselves?

Operators know all about their devices, the multitude of operating systems that are abound in this segment, they understand their network better and they have reach to 10s of millions of consumers who are also consumers of large enterprises. Can operators create focused vertical solutions for their Enterprise customers? Consumers are hungry for applications and Enterprises all around are trying to use mobile devices as a new sales and service channel. How can an operator enable their customers to shop at a large Retail Outlet avoiding the long queues or enable a local grocery to reach out to their customers with mobile coupons?

What are your thoughts on extending Enterprise mobility solutions/application beyond employees to an enterprise’s customers?

What can Operators do to enable the Enterprises meet with their mobility challenges? How can operators provide a platform for Enterprises to launch their mobile applications? What are the benefits Enterprises can realize from doing this?

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 04:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How are the MSOs going to drive value without increasing the prices for subscriber?  On a competitive scale, it will be interesting to see how the PPVH price point compares to the Telcos / Satellite providers. Not sure if this data is available somewhere….

Now back to PPVH...To appreciate the PPVH data better, let’s look at Nielsen’s latest Q2’09 A2/M2 measurement report on average TV consumption trend. Nielsen estimates that the current average American TV consumption is around 141 hrs per month. On a year-to-year basis, the consumption has increased only by 1.5%, whereas it has dropped 8% qtr-over-qtr. Nielsen’s latest data also shows that the online video viewership has increased by 45.5% over 2008, though the usage has been flat.

Posted by Balajee Natarajan at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)