Editorial Articles

More than 20 million people in the UK own a smart phone. The question is no longer whether a brand needs a mobile strategy but how best to achieve relevant and meaningful engagement with the medium.

For the digital marketing industry, the question is no longer when to include mobile in the marketing strategy but how. Five years from now brands without a mobile presence are likely to be viewed in a similar way to brands without a web site today.

Mobile is a unique and challenging medium: we all know it is the most personal device we own and with this comes advantages and disadvantages. Dialogue between a brand and a user on their most personal device offers the opportunity to engage in a compelling way. Yet if the communication is poorly executed it will feel far more intrusive to the consumer, simply because the device is so personal. For this reason, brands should view mobile as a new and unique medium.

Mobile is different. Marketers that understand why it is different will be best placed to benefit.

Typically marketers have tended to see mobile as a series of technical issues. Different handsets have different operating systems, screen sizes and web browsers, which means a difficult choice of either creating bespoke services for many devices (very expensive) or providing a “one size fits all” approach that could deliver a poor user experience or a bad brand execution. Neither is particularly attractive.

There is, however, a more fundamental issue: that of context. People use mobile in very different ways to a PC. Simply replicating web content to a mobile is worse than pointless: it confirms that a brand has placed no importance of the context in which mobile users find themselves: with limited time on their hands and a need to access information; communicate or be entertained, quickly and easily.

Brands need to recognise the constraints and opportunities that mobile devices offer and deliver solutions that play to its strengths and overcome the challenges. Mobile offers opportunities such as the provision of location specific information, which add a unique relevance to services and builds bridges between virtual networking and the physical world. Yet it also comes with challenges: for example how to create engaging services that suit a smaller screen size and limited number of input keys.

It goes without saying that the customer experience is critical to the development of any service but this is especially true for mobile where the importance of attention to relevant detail can transform user engagement. When mobile services combine both engaging experiences and a powerful representation of the brand values of an organisation, the results are compelling. At Seren we describe this as Functional Branding. When applied within service design, Functional Branding can generate increased revenues, reduced customer issues and increased brand awareness.

As mobile devices become more complex, so does the challenge of delivering meaningful branded services in a simple and elegant way. In the past some organisations have seen the mobile opportunity as a future strategy, for tomorrow not today. With users’ increasing appetite for mobile data services, this is no longer an option.

The brands that will gain most from mobile will be those that truly understand the medium and create experience-led, branded services that meet the demands of mobile users.

Author: Catherine Lawford, Managing Director, Seren