Customer World

How will customers change their shopping habits with mobile?

With mobile device in the hands of customers and quick adoption of smartphones, will it redefine the shopping habits of customers? I believe it will. 

Mobile will increasingly act as research and shopping tool in their hands. Right now, I don't think it is widely used but with increasing app downloads & penetration, mobile internet adoption etc. this is certainly going to change shopping experiences - right from the way they search for products/brands/services and helping them choose & buy them too.

I believe it will  be a " check, learn, ask & walk "(CLAW) shopping model on the mobile. It will be a mix of ' text & mortar' shopping. Mobile will overtake internet shopping in my opinion and adoption of mobile in certain categories will be significant.

Which categories need to get ready for this change?  An nice study by emarketer can used as a benchmark by marketers to ensure they get ready for this shopping  habit transition. In countries like India, China & Japan where the mobile penetration & growth is high - the impact will be felt the maximum.

 

 

This mobile shopping habit will have to encompass a mix of mobile apps, call-in advisors, chats, mobile alerts, location based services, mobile coupon downloads & redemption@ the store. Marketers will have to plan for an Integrated Mobile Shopping Experience (IMSE). 

 

 

 

Have you measured the ripple effect in your company?

I read an interesting post by Fred Reichheld's on the influencing effect of good customer experience in a way that happy customers and employees collaborating with each other and how this behaviour seems to extend between customers too. Reichheld writes:

"It didn’t take long to figure out that the caliber of customers who frequent a business - and the way they treat employees and one another- often play a vital role. In air travel, consider the difference between a flight where you’re sitting next to a noisy jerk on his cell phone and one where your neighbor sits quietly and maybe offers to share his newspaper. At a baseball game, a beer-swilling loudmouth can ruin the experience, while an avuncular neighbor who explains the nuances of infielder positioning to your kids can enhance it. In a hotel, you might have a thoughtful neighbor who keeps his TV volume low or an idiot who slams the door at midnight. In fact, other customers create a big part of our experience in retail stores, fast food, hospitals... most businesses, in fact."

I agree with him completely and this indeed has a huge ripple effect.It is true across some of my experiences too. One of them is Jet Airways. Every time I travel with Jet Airways in India, the consistency of the quality of customers who travel along with me and employee service is quite evident across cities. In fact, I would say that this also resets expectations of service within the company and helps them break their own benchmarks on this service. Also, the positive word-of-mouth is also a contributing factor. For example, I have seen many customers talk to me positively about their experience during flights and it has a lasting impact on the service levels of the employees.

This can be true of small companies too. Here's a small restaurant that has created a ripple effect and  influenced my customer experience in Mumbai( India) called Rajdhani. What I really appreciate about this place is that they have a counter in front of the restaurant that has a count of number of "dinners or lunches" served till date! It runs into several hundreds of thousands of servings.This has a ripple effect on the pride of the employees serving you on the table. They are agile, involved, empathetic and quick to proactively respond to what you need. They have interesting signs through which they communicate with each other to ensure you are served without you asking for it! The customers in the restaurant too have a great experience which in turn converts into repeat customers and positive word-of-mouth.

Measuring or observing the ripple effect on your customers, between your customers, amongst employees and even with your channel( retailers) partners is a good metric of the quality of customer experience your brand is delivering in the market place.

Netflix Queues - The power of visualization of data & preferences

Tim O' Reilly tweeted about an interesting interactive feature on NY Times on using the popular movies rented data on Netflix by neighborhoods and zipcodes in the US! It's a lovely little application that tells movies marketers the kind of preferences consumers have had in 2009. 

This made me reflect on the infinite opportunities that are available on how data can be used in a number of ways imaginatively. Imagine the interesting applications of data:

1. Grocery stores - Households and neighbourhoods that are calorie conscious and like exotic foods. FMCG brands can then use this information to do interesting promotions across different zones based on consumption patterns.
2. Fitness Shops  - Zones that have different membership rates and ability to differentiate fitness freak zones from the not-so-fitness freak zones. Nike could use this effectively to build a community of fitness awarness champions across zipcodes to make the zones fitness conscious and the based on the number of people joining the fitness campaigns the 'heat maps' can become more and more red everyday!

The next decade is all about the imaginative use of data that's available with companies & visualization of the same, across offline and online media to get consumers to start interesting conversations amongst themselves.Brands that are able to leverage this trend will build stronger engagement with their customers.

Data-driven advertising - How do we move it beyond the web?

I came across an interesting service platform Meme Machine which has interesting customer-focused applications using data.

Calling itself reactive advertising Meme Machine defines this platform as:

"Reactive advertising is a technology for dynamic customization how display ads look and behave in real-time based on what we know about each viewer and the surrounding factors for each exposure. So instead of one campaign having three different ads, we can run three million different ads, where each is unique for the person watching it. Real-time data and dynamic content are two of the things that makes the Internet really unique. Coming up with the basic ideas for a dynamic ad is just one piece of the puzzle and you also need an engine that can mix up the data and make sure that the right stuff is actually shown to the right people."

Meme Machine has a reaction library and has some cases like Scandinavian Airlines, Swedish Post etc. 

How do we really fuse data that's online, offline and transactional?

To make this more widespread & relevant to a consumer &  marketer, the question that came to my mind really was, how do we use offline data & behaviour for such a service in addition to online information that gets tracked. Imagine a variety of devices and vehicles that consumers today either read, watch, listen, carry along with them - radio( FM), TV, Mobile, Outdoor, Magazines, Newspapers etc.which is not tagged or data rich today.

I believe we still have a long way to go  & innovate here. Here in lies interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped. There must be different applications across devices & media vehicles that must bring this to life. The control, of course, must lie with the consumers to bring all of this together. The applications must talk to each other, pull relevant content, send proactive messages as things happen in each media vehicle or device or by interest tagged by consumers, to bring this conversation & experience to life with each consumer.

Learning when not use mobile for marketing!

According 1-to-1 media, the mobile industry has a lot of learning to do from email marketing industry - esp. how not use it! Take a look:

Taking into account email's bad customer experiences with spam and email address sales, the mobile marketing industry developed its channel strategy around the concept that consumers control the relationship.

"When we hear that beep, everybody looks right away," says Steve Leonard, general manager at mobile firm Motricity, speaking about responsiveness to text messages.Consumers are now more willing to respond to offers via SMS because they know that no one will sell their mobile number and they can easily get out if the relationship doesn't meet their expectations.....consumer-controlled relationship will only increase as technology advances to allow mobile banking, purchases, and other applications. And while high-tech devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry are important to drive mobile's evolution....

The key to mobile marketing's future success lies in its metrics capabilities.... Calls-to-action like mobile coupon redemption or in-venue sweepstakes allow companies to track consumer actions to specific marketing initiatives.....

My View:  In India especially, this medium already has the effect of email marketeers' misuse. The amount of junk SMSs we receive is quite high. Also, many companies have started using it for mobile alerts, mobile marketing initiatives etc. Sometimes, it is quite a pain or does not get the attention of customers as it would earlier. It needs to be used judiciously and it must move away from regular transactional messages to relationship messages too.

Ideas are welcome. Any ideas to kick-start this thinking?

Building value in mobility - Some perspective

Over the last couple of months, I have been talking and meeting a lot mobile service providers in India across many forums. While most of them are in an acquisition binge, the challenges they seem to face are similar - irrespective of the vintage of operation or subscriber size. They either talk to me of huge shift from post-paid subscribers to pre-paid subscribers, reducing revenue from voice services, increasing usage of VAS and data services, lack of differentiation in their own offerings for customers to choose or switch, customer churn and many more! To add to the confusion, there are new service providers entering the fray. How do these service providers build value for their customers and become compelling?  Visionmobile provides an interesting perspective and approach to consider - Value Quadrants:

Value Quadrants maps value creation and revenue model changes by asking WHEN and WHERE is value being created. The WHEN of value creation is function of the handset lifecycle, from design, development and production (pre-sales phase) to point-of-sale and in-life use (post-sales phase). There WHERE of value creation is either on the device (hardware, software, patents and industrial design) or on the services ‘cloud’ (for designing and delivering content and services).

In one quadrant, value is created by intellectual property, in the other value is built out of licensing and in the other one it is out of infrastructure. Many companies have started to take position in these quadrants.

The revenue models that emerge out of these value quadrants are quite different and unique:

To me this is an interesting map for mobility service providers in India to evaluate their offerings and determine what  migration and transition of services that they need to make or build  to create value and stickiness in their offerings for customers either thro' alliances, product/service development, new revenue-sharing models etc.

Guess, there's lot to think now!