April 2009

The Next Great thing has an excellent piece on things to consider when designing around a channel like Mobile (though it’s applicable to other channels as well).

It’s a great list to force yourself to go through in an effort to ensure that you are creating something of value and not just building something “mobile” because it’s a check box on someone’s list.

Entertainment and Utility is the biggest offender in my opinion. So many brands don’t put in the necessary effort to create genuinely useful content. For every Kraft or Clif Bar, there are hundreds of companies just throwing nonsense up hoping customers will somehow just end up there.

Personally, I find the most interesting apps to be built by brands, like Clif, who’ve identified content loosely related to their brand (in this case, ski conditions) and then built their app around that. Ultimately that’s a much stronger play than trying to build something vanilla in an effort to please everyone.

Integration is another place where the ball gets dropped – a lot of brands don’t know how to modify their story to include these new experiences/platforms in a way that feels right to the consumer.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece but here are the highlights:

How can mobile campaigns get stronger? Our research and conversations with mobile experts revealed two dominant themes: integration and simplicity. We’ve established a simple set of filters around these themes to test whether your idea makes sense. They can be applied to any channel, but are especially important with mobile given the nature of the medium:

1) Sustained Presence
Consider that most people have their mobile devices within ten feet at any given time. With a sustained presence, you are putting your brand within their reach—24/7. Stake your ground with a WAP site and think of it as your mobile home. Short-term promotions are like party invitations, but you should let people drop for a visit any time they want.

2) Entertainment and Utility
Advertising is moving from a distraction model towards an engagement model. 30-second spots and banner ads are giving way to enduring experiences, as budgets shift from media buys to content production. This convergence is blurring the lines between awareness and engagement, promotion and product. The content, e.g. an iPhone app, needs to be compelling in it of itself. Good content is the best advertising.

3) Relevance
One of the biggest advantages of mobile is three-point targeting: time, location, and demographics. Use these! The more personal and contextual your marketing is, the more likely it is that people will respond to it. The main question one should strive to answer here is, “why do I need to view this on my mobile device and not on my desktop or TV?”

4) Control
If you create something entertaining and/or useful, people will want it. Do not force it on them using push tactics. Phones are considered to be a personal, filtered space, so put the consumer in control. Always allow people to opt-in and opt-out at any time and be very clear about what people are signing up for.

5) Interaction
Give people something they’d be interested in and promote interaction with others. Remember to merge any feedback into product development and customer service initiatives lest you lose the valuable two-way conversation altogether. Remind consumers that you are listening by thanking them for their comments and responding to them directly.

6) Integration
You can’t create an iPhone app “Field of Dreams”-style: build it and they will come. “Your strategy needs to combine multiple media to get the word out, whether it is TV, social networks, print, radio…” says Litman. So instead of asking, “What should my mobile strategy be,” the question is rather, “how do I extend my marketing strategy in the mobile channel?” This means that agencies—advertising, media, mobile—need to work together from the outset to ensure cohesiveness from conception to execution.

Make sure to check out the rest of the article.

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