My voice

I am positive that this is a widely discussed topic in a CPG company - should we reach our consumers on their mobile phone?

Retailers have it easy. They control the POS, and hence get a 360’ view of a consumer (in this situation, a shopper). But, in the case of CPG companies, how does reaching the consumers on their mobile phone benefit them?

Well, here is my two cents: CPG should absolutely invest in mobile marketing initiatives.

Here is why:

1. Smartphone sales is going to out sell feature phones by 2012

2. Mobile browsing is going to out-pace desktop browsing by 2013

The above two data points clearly shows that the consumers are becoming more familiar with consuming content on their mobile phone. This means that more and more people will the accessing information on their mobile phone, which includes all demography - stayhome moms, retired grand-parents, working professional, college/high-school kids.

Here is how it is relevant to CPG companies: It is important for CPG companies to capture the mind-share of a shopper when he/she is thinking about shopping. We know that 70% of the shoppers make their brand purchasing decisions before they walk into the retail store. Most shoppers, about 90% of them, do their research online (desktop/laptop) prior to shopping. In the coming years, shoppers will start to do their purchasing research on the go, on their mobile phones. It could be through a client app, location based information, mobile browsing or a combination of all. This spike in mobile marketing adoption will force marketers to re-visit their digital marketing spend and start looking at mobile as a primary channel of media consumption.

So, if you are a marketer at CPG company, start integrating mobile into your over all marketing plan. If you want some help in defining the success criteria for your mobile marketing initiatives, check out my next blog on “Mobile Marketing Measurements for CPG”.

I would always love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.

Over the past month or so, I have had several meetings with digital marketing teams in both retail and CPG companies. The original premise of my meeting was to demo/pitch our (eCO - eXtendMobility Consumer Outreach) interactive mobile marketing/analytics platform and services. So far, the responses have been good; we are in next level discussions with most of our prospects. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the prospects didn’t have a clear strategy around mobile marketing. They all felt the need to do something on the mobile channel, but were grappling with the details around how to make it actionable, and more importantly how to measure the performance of the mobile initiatives. This got me thinking about the essential elements of a mobile marketing. If I had the opportunity to come up with the mobile marketing strategy for any of these companies, how would I do it?

Here are my two cents around how to establish a mobile marketing strategy:

First and foremost, we need to embrace the fact that mobile is a complex marketing channel with more than one way to reach consumers on their handsets - SMS, Mobile Web, client apps (iPhone, Android, etc), bluetooth. It is important to clearly understand all the nuances involved in communicating in these micro-mobile channels. We should always remember that when we talk about mobile marketing, it applies to all of the above mentioned micro-mobile channels, collectively. So, remember, iPhone app alone does not qualify as mobile marketing strategy. Look at the big picture.

Once we understand the complexity of creating marketing communications through various micro-mobile channels, we can then focus on best practices on how to set up a measurable mobile marketing strategy.

Here are my thoughts around how to make the mobile marketing strategy measurable and effective

Integrated - It is important to make sure that the mobile marketing initiatives are in-line and integrated with the rest of the marketing initiatives, such as email, online, direct mail. It is a good practice to establish this parity so that consumers can freely adopt to consuming marketing content on their mobile phones. This parity in marketing programs will make it easy for consumers to move between marketing channels (email - online - mobile) seamlessly and will help in understanding the consumer behaviors and cross-channel attribution. 

Commerce driven- The underlying reason for any kind of marketing is to promote commerce, increase the basket size, up-sell/cross-sell. So, why should mobile marketing be any different? We need to make sure that there is a clear commerce element in all of the mobile marketing initiatives. I don’t mean in a literal sense where each mobile marketing message is an offer or coupon. It can be informational message or alerts about recalls, but when syndicated the right way, it should result in long term value, build consumer loyalty, which in-turn results in repeat visits (purchases). Mobile channel can also be used purely as a medium of communicating with the consumers, educating them of the benefits and finally driving them to show up at the nearest retail store - increase foot traffic to the stores. This strategy can be further enhanced by the location aware mobile marketing campaigns. 

Data in - Data out - Mobile marketing is extremely data driven. In order to get the most out of mobile marketing initiatives, we need first try to answer the following questions before we come up with mobile marketing initiatives:

Who are the target consumers?

What do the consumers want to receive?

Where do the consumers want to receive?

When do they want to receive?

Similarly, we also need to make sure that we gather as much data possible to connect the dots from the moment a marketing message was sent to a consumer to the time the consumer shows up at the store (or online) to redeem (or take some action) the offer. This data will be extremely valuable in performing attributional analysis across multiple channels.

Marketing message -  The mobile marketing strategy should automatically account for the nuances involved in delivering a marketing campaign across the micro-mobile channels (SMS, mobile web, client apps, etc). It is important to make sure that this section of the strategy is fully automated, otherwise it might take up additional internal resources to manage the mobile marketing initiatives. 

Personalization - Personalization is always a must-have when it comes to delivering to consumer’s mobile phone. At the very least make sure that the mobile marketing strategy should account for some form of machine learning algorithms to ensure that consumer does not see what he/she is not interested in. 

I would always love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.

We all live a digitally connected lifestyle, right? We broadcast our likes, dislikes, our vacation pictures and even our real-time location.

Why do we still have to explicitly specify our preferences every-time we shop?

Why are we still expected to sift through coupons (paper or digital) at the time of purchase? Don’t they know my shopping preferences or my transactional history?

Come on, it is about time that retailers and CG companies pay attention to me and give me what I want and make my life easy.

Where do you think is the problem? What can we do to fix it?

Why not think about browser as OS and start integrating all the apps (native and mobile browser-Safari, Opera, etc) into the mobile search. If you do this then you can view content (both long-tail and short-tail) on any of the apps (native apps or browser app).

From consumer experience point of view, this paradigm helps to make the discover-ability and consumption of online content easy and repeatable. Isn’t this a basic problem with the app-store model?

If you believe in this paradigm, then go ahead and start thinking about mobile-SEO !!!

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.

Well, you must be wondering how did I come up with “round 4.0”. To the best of my knowledge, this discussion started with the advent of iPhone, and Apple recently announced the OS version 4.0 which will be released this summer, hence the name.

This browser vs app battle has become an arcane topic of discussion in the blogosphere, conferences, special interests groups and other off-shoot discussion forums and tech/geeky water cooler conversations. But, what do everyday, non-techcrunch following, non-geeky consumer think about this dilemma, who are they siding with and how has this impacted their day to day lifestyle?

To answer this question, let’s look at what technologies and/or services that spearheaded the internet to its current prominence.

Technology trends that helped online (computers) content consumption:

In layman’s terms, we can segment this discussion into three key technology verticals

Hardware 

Software and services

Networks

Hardware: The physical hardware was very expensive. Only government and universities could afford them. But with breakthrough in silicon technologies, the proliferation of computers happened and we, common consumer, could afford  laptops and PCs with good processing power.

Software and Services: Software on the other hand had some interesting twist to its development. In the initial stages of evolution, Software technologies was treading the same course of development as hardware technologies (dependency on hardware capabilities). Today anyone can put up content on the internet, thanks to cloud computing and open source software. But, according to me, it was “Search” that revolutionized the way consumers viewed internet. Or in other words, “search technologies” made the vast internet content accessible for consumers in a format that is easy to consume.

Networks: I don’t think I will have to elaborate here. Dial up modems —>high-speed cable/DSL modems —> Fiber.

Now, back to the topic at hand. Be it app (client app) or browser, the question here is the accessibility to online content.

Current mobile technology trends that is helping mobile content consumption:

I personally feel that mobile content adoption will also follow the same route as it’s older sibling (online). We are seeing some of the early trends in the above three technologies:

Mobile Hardware: It is needless to say that more and more mobile phones are coming out with faster processors and more memory .The fact that “Smartphones” have become the largest growing mobile phone category further substantiates the earlier (online) paradigm.

Mobile Networks: In fact all of the service providers in USA have rolled out 3G services and are now talking about 4G, the next generation of faster mobile networks.

Mobile Software and Services: WAP, WML —> XHTML (MP) —> HTML —> Web2.0. We see a similar trend in the mobile software technology adoption as in Online. But, according to me, what is missing here and could be the next BIG thing is the integrated mobile “search” - search that will make discovering content from the vast internet easy and simple. Until this integrated search becomes a reality, we will continue to see discussions like mobile browser delivered or mobile apps delivered polarize the tech/geeky consumer base.

Here is my two cents as a consumer (layman): Be it app or browser, the idea is to get to the content. Apps may solve the discover-ability problem for short-tail content today, but as we all know, the power of the internet lies in the long-tail content. One way to bridge these two worlds (apps & browser) is to make apps and the associated contents search-able. I want to see apps show up in my mobile search results.

Here is an use case:

Consumer searches for “Pollen count” on his/her mobile phone. The search result shows both apps that displays content around pollen count for the “current location”, as well as links to the websites that specializes with content related to pollen. ( I am not going to talk about ranking and SEO here ). The consumer is given an option to view the content in an app (that he will have to download) or view the contents in a mobile browser.

Even better, if I already have an App that displays pollen count downloaded on my mobile phone, my search result should automatically open the downloaded app and show me the relevant content inside the app. This behavior/user experience will definitely enhance my (terrible spring allergies)  lifestyle.

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.