How NOT to use QR

I often use newer technology as it is deployed In Real Life to stay up to date with how mobile is being used in marketing.

This past week I had an experience that stunned and saddened me.  So here’s my Public Service Announcement: Don’t Let This Happen to Your Brand.

A major US magazine published an interactive print version this month.  Over a dozen advertisers included a Quick Response (QR) code in their ads. 

I was enthused to try a Real Life QR example.  Ralph Lauren has been a leader in mobile marketing, and I assumed that the magazine and its advertisers would at least be close to that high level of sophistication.  (Check out why RL was named 2009 Mobile Marketer of the Year.)

Sadly, the magazine’s use of QR was worse than uninspiring.  It was a total washout.  How did the magazine go wrong?  Let us count the ways:

1. Zero instant gratification  Not one of the promotions gave me anything on the day I participated.  Not a store locator, not a game, not a coupon.  For the majority, I opted in to enter a contest for a give-away.  Of the minority who offered coupons or discounts, not one delivered a coupon to my phone.  Disappointed, I then assumed I would receive them through email with instructions to print the coupon.  Reality is far worse:  I opted in to these promotions Monday morning, May 3.  As of Friday, May 7,  I have received nothing - not even a simple acknowledgment of my opt-in to receive the magazine’s future promotions.  A colleague  predicts that I will eventually receive those coupons in a week or two… via snail mail.

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How to be a Mobile Marketing Genius

In addition to providing fast, easy, effective mobile offers through Software as a Service, MixMobi also consults with larger firms to integrate MixMobi in major projects.

Our goal when consulting is simple:

We want you to be confident and to feel like an expert without spending months on research.

Regardless of industry, these basics inform every recommendation:

• Demographics are Fundamental  Before you invest in any mobile marketing, you and your senior leadership must understand your target audience’s mobile usage.  For example, a university marketing firm should be confident quoting Pew Research’s finding that “Cellphone texting has become the preferred channel of … communication between teens and their friends.”  Cheat Sheet: Pew Research and Tomi Ahonen’s blog (links to both are included here) are two of my favorite sources for demographic stats related to mobile.
• Smartphones are Sexy… but SMS is still The King and Social Media is the Crown Prince Smartphone applications generate $13 billion revenue worldwide to SMS’ $113 billion.  Mobile measurement firm Ground Truth recently found that consumers use mobiles for social networking 60% of the time. If you are considering a mobile marketing program without an SMS or Social Media component, think again. Cheat Sheet: If you’re not sure how to use SMS or Social Media with mobile in your industry, find a competitor who uses one or both successfully.  Remember why the good Lord gave you eyes: plagiarize.
  
• Measure Twice, Execute Once  Measurement is still often crude or incomplete in the mobile world, so ask any marketing provider how much time and money they have invested in results measurement for mobile campaigns.  It should be substantial.  Cheat Sheet: If your prospective mobile marketing provider isn’t enthused to talk about measurement, keep looking until you find a partner who is.
• Know before you Go Regardless of what mobile marketing methods you choose, or what firms you engage to help you, you’re ultimately responsible for your campaign.  Cheat Sheet: Particularly if you are new to mobile marketing, appoint someone on your team to ensuring your program is compliant with the Mobile Marketing Association’s Best Practices.   

It’s extremely easy to be distracted from the basics.  The iPad is gorgeous.  I love my iPhone and am dazzled by the new HTC Incredible.  The opportunities in 2D (which I spent the morning researching today) are entrancing. 

But as with any discipline, it’s always the basics that will make or break your campaign.  So have fun exploring, but focus on these four fundamentals.  And be a Genius.

Photo: Greg Kinear in “Flash of Genius”.  President Nixon and Elvis, Wikimedia.

If You Build It…

Earlier this week, I blogged about Morgan Stanley’s latest predictions, focusing on their observations and forecast on mobile.

We enthusiasts, hip-deep in the details (and often guilty of gazing too far into the future), need to stay grounded with where companies are today and what happens next.

For a bracing counterpoint to Morgan Stanley’s projections, I found Multichannel Merchant’s “Outlook 2010: E-Commerce” survey and ATG’s “Cross-Channel Commerce: The Consumer View” survey cited by eMarketer today:

Consumers, though they are avid cross-channel shoppers, have only embraced mobile browsing and purchasing on a small scale. Three-quarters of respondents to ATG’s “Cross-Channel Commerce: The Consumer View” survey said they never researched products on their handsets in Q4 2009.

At first glance, this appears to be a perfect antidote to Meeker’s “swing for the fences,” “don’t be left behind” mindset.  (So if you’re advocating for mobile marketing within your firm, make sure your boss doesn’t see it.)

But upon further examination, the data and Meeker’s predictions are not contradictory.  In fact, shoppers’ lack of mobile activity is quite predictable: no matter how much they want to browse, research or purchase via their mobiles, there’s virtually nothing provided by the merchants to support those activities.  Numerous studies have repeatedly shown consumers to be highly dissatisfied with mobile interaction opportunities.  Far from not being ready for mobile, consumers (even in North America) have been ready for some time.

This being the start of baseball season, I’ll leave you with this thought.  As progressive retailers from Target to JC Penney are finding in mobile marketing: if you build it, they’ll already be there … waiting for you.

What Just Happened ?

Mary Meeker and her team at Morgan Stanley published an updated Internet Trends mega-deck yesterday.  It updates her startling predictions of a few months ago.  Here’s a cheat sheet to the slides you need to read to avoid being left wondering “what just happened?” in mobile marketing.

• The mobile internet continues to ramp far faster than the desktop internet did.  The interesting implication is that this river is rushing past you much faster than the internet did — your time-to-market margin for error with mobile is shrinking faster every day (Slide 7).
• Morgan Stanley predicts mobile internet users will outnumber desktop users within five years (Slide 8).  Note not just the intersection point predicted here, but the slope of each line.  They also believe that this phenomenon will be “bigger than most think” with 3G, social, video, VoIP and more sophisticated mobile devices converging (Slide 22).
• Social networking is surpassing email (Slide 12).  Much of this phenomenon is unevenly distributed by demographic, but it’s still important to remember, especially regarding social + mobile marketing.
• For you macro-econ fans: Morgan Stanley asserts that we are now two years into a ten year mobile internet computing cycle (Slide 17).
• Boss still not convinced your company needs social media presence?  Facebook and YouTube saw the biggest growth in share over past three years (Slide 31).
• “Game-Changing” platforms integrating social networking and mobile “emerging very rapidly” (Slides 45 - 60).  Skim these slides for a quick overview of many significant developments and their impacts.
• Mobile phone usage is becoming more data-intensive, used less for voice over time (Slide 62). 

The deck ends with this pithy prediction: “Rapid ramp of mobile internet usage will be a boon to consumers and some companies will likely win big (potentially very big) while many will wonder what just happened.”

Start Your Engines!

In times of tumult, we can easily get over-stimulated.  Like second graders eating too many birthday party cupcakes, we get distracted by every. little. thing…and unable to get much of anything done.

Fourth quarter 2009 and first quarter 2010 have been an endless parade of distractions in mobile marketing.  New devices, turf wars, what Tomi Ahonen calls a “bloodbath” in smartphones and (this past week) the iPad.

Whew.  If I’d had that many distractions in grade school, I’d still be repeating long division.  But now that we’re solidly into 2010, it’s time to stop being distracted and start getting mobile.  More and more companies are realizing:

• For once, the public is way ahead of marketers.  Adam Cahill of ClicZ said it well: “many (if not most) brands are still in the ‘dipping our toes in the water’ phase when it comes to mobile.  Meanwhile, consumers have cannon-balled into the deep end of the pool and aren’t looking back.” (Emphasis mine.)

• Applications can be fun, and they can be an important part of the mix.  But reality is that only 20% of consumers own smartphones and half of paid smartphone apps get less than 1,000 downloads.  That’s just not mass marketing.

• Asia is leading the way, and in many countries, well over half the 18 - 34 demographic is on social media, with most using it via mobile devices. 62 - 84% of adults 18 - 34 are on Facebook in countries including Vietnam (83%), India (79%), South Korea (75%) and Japan (67%).  This tsunamic wave is rolling our way - and fast.

Steve Cannon, Mercedes-Benz USA VP of Marketing is quoted in MediaPost this week as “not in a rush to execute on social media. … It will take us time to articulate why [Mercedes Benz] is a premium product. The good news is we have time to do it.”

Mr. Cannon, if you have not started to learn your way around social media and mobile marketing, you are now standing at the starting line and the competition will lap you.  Ladies and gentlemen: Start Your Engines.

Photo credit: ChilledPhill

Driving Miss Daisy

Knowing how to drive an automobile wasn’t required to participate in modern life during the first half of the 20th century.

Many men and women in particular were unlikely to know how to drive until mid-century.  Women’s increasing participation in the workforce during World War II, the growth of suburbs, and the new American Interstate drove near-100% participation very quickly.

Mobile today resembles the saturation turning point for automobiles after World War II in North America.  

CTIA recently reported that 91% of Americans (over 285 million) carry at least one cellphone.  Subtracting pre-schoolers, we’re close to 100% market saturation.

As described in Experian Simmons’ “American Mobile Consumer Report” this week, American mobile subscribers can be grouped by mobile usage habits:

- Social Connectors (22%) These mobile users are responsible for 600% growth in Facebook use via mobiles in 2009.  Communications with friends is crucial for this population and both social sites and text messaging are as (if not more) critical for them than voice.

- Mobirati (19%) This population grew up with cellphones and cannot conceive of life without one (or two!) mobile devices.  They use their mobile for voice, texting, alarm clock, web browsing, social media and entertainment.  Other researchers including the Pew Internet and American Life Project have noted that this segment and Social Connectors increasingly use their mobiles as their primary internet access device (vs desktop or laptop).

- Pragmatic Adopters (22%) This segment did not grow up with mobile phones, but they are learning that they are handy for more than just voice communications.  The “gateway drug” into texting for this segment is staying in touch with teenage or adult children.  Once there, these users are primed to discover mobile web browsing for sports, weather and news.

- Mobile Professionals (17%) Originally pioneered by brick-phone lugging sales professionals, this segment is now quite broad.  Frequently Mobile Professionals’ mobile device is a smartphone (typically Blackberry) provided by their employer for work use.   

- Basic Planners (20%) Behind the Pragmatic Adoptors in the learning curve, subscribers in this group only use their mobile phone for voice communications.  Note that this group numbers only 1 in 5.

With 91% penetration and only 20% using their mobile only for voice communications, mobile is truly at its turning point.  

Photo credits: “Driving Miss Daisy,” Sony Ericsson Daisy edition

*As fans of the film know, the “Miss Daisy” character does know how to drive.  She is forced to accept a chauffeur after an accident renders her “uninsurable.”