I saw an article recently where the author pondered the consumers’ slow acceptance of mobile content. It seems that content providers and marketers are far more excited about the delivery of video and marketing messages on mobile phones than consumers are. There’s the huge push to provide people with small-screen TV on mobile phones while almost forgetting that consumers already have big-screens on which to watch their television programs. One of the major problems is that we keep trying to push mobile in the same way that we push TV and they are entirely different animals. We’re not thinking about it in a “Marketnology” way.
Let’s think about mobile phones from a marketing perspective. What marketing demographic is most likely to use the ancillary (non-phone) services of their mobile phones? My educated guess is kids 13-17 and men and women 18-34. Now, since we know that let’s think about their lifestyles. The kids spend their days at school, come home and (hopefully) do their homework, play video games, IM, surf the web and watch some TV. Adults spend their days at college or work, go home, figure out what’s for dinner, play video games, surf the web and watch some TV. While I admit that my analysis seems pretty rudimentary, it drives home a point — when are people going to consume all of this mobile content? When are they going to have the time to dedicate their attention to watching TV and viewing ads on their mobile phones?
What it comes down to is that the mobile phone is a tool. Before people will seriously consider consuming content on their phones, the phone has to be integrated into their lives. Instead, we keep trying to move consumers from left-end of the mobile phone spectrum, calling people, straight to through the right-end, downloading lots and lots of content. While we’re doing that, research is showing that most consumers aren’t even interested in taking pictures with their phones — not to mention accessing the Internet.
Let’s start off with some training wheels. Let’s convince Disney to run a trial at Disney World where people can get a Fastpass to a couple of rides by SMSing a short code with that day or hour’s secret code (to make sure people are actually in the park). When it’s your time for the ride, you get an SMS back. Let’s help make consumers’ daily lives easier by giving them information they need (e.g. bus/train schedules, traffic info, etc.). Also, let’s work encourage automobile manufacturers to implement standards like Bluetooth 3.0 (or whatever it will be called) earlier so that consumers will be able to pipe their mobile downloadable content to their cars. These are the type of things that will make people value their cell phones.
What do you think?
Hey -
I think that kids undoubtedly use their phones in school, en route to school, when they ought to be doing homework, etc. To get them using it in ways that might prove to be more productive in these settings, perhaps schools could interface their school calendars w/ them; this would include not only the information about holidays and upcoming events but also assignment due dates. This would be useful for parents, too. One of my mentees had the wrong dates for her finals – so she showed up to her Math final only to find out it was actually Chemistry, which we were FAR from having her prepared for!