Buyers of products or services have a threshold below which they have little to no expectation for a positive, measurable return on their investment. Items along these lines are instead bought based on an expected, subjective value — e.g. soap to clean your hands, tissue to blow your nose. Brand preference for either of these examples influence purchase, but relative to business to business services they are commodities for all practical purposes. Commodities tend to succeed based on price.
Many marketers are entering the mobile arena with a similar view on text messaging. As has been widely reported, investments in SMS marketing campaigns are often driven by curiosity with a focus on trial. The same could be argued around the market for mobile applications. A hard monetary return is often thus not considered as important in a buy decision as the price of the product or service — just like commodities, yet unlike household products, you could say mobile is a “hot commodity” right now with plenty of demand to go around the ecosystem of suppliers.
Once the unbridled enthusiasm around mobile begins to ebb and is replaced by more rational, measured decision making, how will this affect the market for mobile marketing technology products and services?
There are two probable outcomes in my view: buyers will gravitate toward the big “brands” from which they source marketing products and services — the well known, long established multi-disciplinary providers who have tacked on a mobile capability to their offerings. Why? Simply because it will represent a low cost, safe choice from a trusted company.
AdMob is not an example of what I’m talking about. Advertising, especially online advertising, has established metrics for valuing such services (CTR, CPM). Once significant scale is achieved, as happened with AdMob, the blend of metrics with scale makes for a highly valued prize.
The other outcome should offer buyers a better, higher value choice, independent of price. Providers which combine scale, metrics and more, will enable marketers to leverage the mobile channel in ways that a commodity choice never can match — via Active Customer Engagement. I’m of course talking about the Mobile Customer Experience, inclusive of all means of targeting customers at the point of device and calling them to action based on marketing objectives which are measurable.
Marketers able to see the distinction, and not fixate on mobile as an adjunct to email or a novel handset application, will be more successful than their peers.
