Give customers something practical and they'll love you
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Samsung has sponsored the installation of docking stations for charging your mobile devices at US airports. How brilliant is that? And how soon are they coming to the UK? Ever more advanced mobile phones mean we're more dependent on them (and leave the laptop at home) at the same time as the little buggers suck more battery power, leaving us swearing at the lack of power points. At least I do.
A recent Advertising Age article talked about several brands that have latched on to warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude by associating themselves with something truly useful. I love it, not only as a consumer but as a consumer-centric innovation consultant too. Samsung is rather brilliantly linking its mobile and electronics brand with serving a great, immediate consumer need in the same area.
I've mentioned before that really good sponsored content and applications could make mobile content services take off. More important for those doing the sponsoring is that giving people useful digital assets can be a cost-effective way of making consumers both grateful and in constant contact with your brand.
This could take the form of digital helpers making life easier or enabling better life-choices. Campaigns could include guides to transport systems, what vegetables are in season or what fish you shouldn't eat because it's dying out. Or something more niche, like a handy but simple vintage guide for wine buffs who can't remember which years were excellent rather than just decent. For those who care, it'd be better than a branded keyring any day.
But it also seems that an as-yet small band of consumers are finally deciding that mobiles are terribly useful for things other than voice and text. And no great surprise, it's all about communication. This time though, it's in line with the zeitgeist: outbound 'broadcast' rather than point to point.
Opera reports that 40% of mobile page views in markets it has monitored are generated by social networks. Add to that outbound SMS Twittering or MMS uploading and we might have a small user revolution on our hands as people seek to share their activities with the world (or at least their friends).
Other data suggests that the social networking phenomenon on mobile isn't mass market, but impressive enough compared with other applications. M:Metrics reports that 4.7% of UK mobile users accessed social networks on their phones in the three months to January. If both these statistics are roughly correct, we have a small band of intense mobile social networkers on our hands.
Because these sites fuel more frequent use, the page-count share is impressive. Opera doesn't touch on whether any revenues are generated for the sites themselves, but it's certainly starting to look like a viable area to attach brands to.
On a more negative note, sharing their whereabouts via mobile social networks can put users who aren't careful with their privacy settings at risk of less welcome people knowing rather too much about them. Then again, perhaps privacy protection is another useful tool for brands to provide to prospective customers. That might even help offset some of the unease with which consumers may view brands' desires to know more and more about them.
Jessica Sandin is senior consultant and head of mobile at ?What If! Digital; jessica.sandin@whatifinnovation.com
