by anton | Feb 26, 2016 |
Most informed South Africans will agree that doom and gloom certainly has been in abundance of late. And the naysayers really upped the ante around the end of last year while the rest of us were attempting to enjoy the well-deserved break that is the annual December and January holiday season. We heard all sorts of predictions about South Africa’s imminent demise that centered on economic growth, the rand, the presidency and all the usual suspects. Thankfully, Minister Pravin Gordhan stepped in and his well-received budget speech helped pull us back to reality. It reminded us that South Africa is, in fact, an upper middle income country of close to 60 million citizens with a significant amount of reserves it can tap into when things start looking a little hairy. We’re no basket case. Far from slipping into recession in 2016, we’re set to grow at about a percent this year and increase that to a percent and just over a half next year. That’s not too bad considering the dire state of the world. Still, it’s not exactly the roaring 90s when it comes to things economic, so we’d be wise to tighten our belts and make the pennies count. This brings us to mobile marketing. The knee-jerk reaction when times are tough is for organisations to trim all marketing budgets, mobile included. The simple answer from InTarget – after almost two decades experience – is DON’T. That there is a case for mobile marketing in times of recession or modest economic growth is borne out by an interview that the CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)...
by anton | Feb 23, 2016 |
A Bank of America vice-president describes the mobile phone, and by extension the marketing that it enables, as “the most personal, most relevant communications device in the history of mankind.” It is strange then, that although marketers are prioritising mobile marketing and increasing their budgets, they are failing to establish good connections with consumers. This was a conversation topic during a morning panel discussion at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. According to panel participants, the idea that brands need to win consumers’ trust stems from the fact that mobile is a very personal experience. What came through in Barcelona is that the industry needs to do a better job explaining and illustrating the value exchange, basically, what’s in mobile marketing for the consumer. All of this is no surprise really and it simply speaks to the relative newness of the discipline. It could be argued that the traditional broadsheet newspaper – we’re talking here Business Day or the New York Times, not the Daily Sun – is the most trusted form of media today. That’s not surprising as quality newspapers have had several hundred years to establish their credentials. And when it comes to individual consumers of newspapers, one paper might have had as many as several decades to build a relationship with a reader. So the trust challenge has been set and now it’s up to brands and their trusted mobile marketing advisors like InTarget to rise to...
by anton | Nov 19, 2015 |
While conventional wisdom has it that Africa is a continent of feature phone users, TechCentral reported a few months ago that in 2019, only 27% of cellphones sold in Africa will be feature phones. The vast majority will be smartphones with 155 million units being shipped next year alone. According to research by International Data Corporation (IDC), feature phone sales are declining by 20 percent every year. Statistics like these are relevant to mobile marketing because industry commentators often use them to signal the death knell of such ‘basic’ mobile marketing campaign tools as SMS and USSD. This is erroneous, however. Simply because USSD and SMS are the mobile marketing bearers feature phone users most often interact with – due to the limitations of their handsets – this doesn’t mean that smartphone users don’t also use text messaging and menu-driven USSD. Whatever figures are quoted for declining feature phone shipments in the coming years, USSD and SMS have in fact become growing mobile marketing bearers in their own right that are independent of handset categories. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. Just because a smartphone user has downloaded an over-the-top (OTT) messaging app such as WhatsApp, doesn’t mean they don’t regularly send and receive SMSs to and from people and organisatons they don’t wish to add to their OTT app. Thanks to the growing popularity of the most successful USSD application ever – Please Call Me – this technology will continue to prove one of the most effective and measurable ways for brands to reach mobile users, in 2019 and...
by anton | Nov 10, 2015 |
Most of us understand mobile marketing to mean, simply, marketing conducted on a mobile device. If we wanted to delve a little deeper, we could look at how marketing professor Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing. According to him, mobile marketing is as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”. The key here is ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘constantly-connected’. One cannot run an effective mobile marketing campaign when consumers are experiencing patchy connectivity, or deliberately limiting their mobile voice and data connectivity because they find it expensive. Connectivity needs to be fast and always-on for mobile consumers to be able to interact with USSD menus, respond quickly to coupons, and more. This brings me to Wi-Fi connectivity and the mobile consumer. In South Africa, many of us have come to view Wi-Fi as a secondary type of mobile connection option that’s used mostly when it’s offered for free at restaurants, conferences and a few other limited public places. In many places in the rest of the world, Wi-Fi is in fact the consumer’s first choice of mobile connection. This is why, for example, Wi-Fi-enabled tablets are more popular in the US than the 3G and Wi-Fi-enabled tablets South African consumers have to buy. Today, there’s a renewed push for greater roll-out of Wi-Fi hotspots in South Africa and it’s being led by the Wi-Fi Forum of SA. In particular, the Forum is trying to get South Africans to buy into the concept of the ‘heterogenous network’ which is simply a nationwide mobile network using small cell networks such as Wi-Fi overlaid with 3G, LTE, etc. So various types of mobile connectivity will complement and switch between each other and deliver a seamless...
