Everyone knows that men and women think act and feel differently, but women have embraced smartphones as an all-encompassing Swiss Army Knife for life. Men use their phones selectively, like a tool, to accomplish specific tasks.
Women are more likely than men to use their smartphones for messaging, talk, web surfing, social networking, games, app downloads and picture taking or sharing. Men and women use email about the same. Men dominate in watching videos, listening to music, reading newspapers and using the GPS app or device. Looking at mobile social media use, men focus on business and dating while women go for relationship building, sharing, entertainment and self-help.
Not surprising gender differences affect consumer behavior. Men are 1.5 times more likely to scan coupons or QR codes. Men are less likely to ignore social media ads and prefer commercial messages with cars, sports, action and sexual themes. In contrast women ignore more social and mobile ads, even though they follow 4 times more brands than men. Women prefer ads with sentimental, family, real-life and pet themes.
The clear implications for marketers are …
Gender Matters. Consider whom you are addressing, both what they doing as they move through their day and how they generally think about mobility and social media. The old clichés and assumptions are no longer valid. Abandon them. Design offers and calls-to-action accordingly.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All. If they think, act and use language differently, it only makes sense to create different content aimed at men and women.
Target Behavior. Now that you know what they use phones for and the themes that resonate with men and women, time and target messages to intersect natural mobile or social behavior. Efficiently give me the information they’re after and make female-oriented content entertaining and shareable.
Honor Half the Sky. Women have been early adopters and are aggressive users of mobile and social technologies. Don’t under-estimate them. Don’t forget their role as household CFO and principal buyer of almost every category of goods and services.
Women frequently influence men. And interactions between the genders are often relevant in building brand awareness, consideration and preference.
Mobility will turn us into direct, relationship and database
marketers.That’s the cornerstone message from two new studies -- Forrester’s
“2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers” and Urbanairship’s “Connect
with the Connected.” The keys to successfully making this transformation
will be surrendering control to consumers while continuously creating relevant
and resonant content.
Let’s start with a few key facts.
Mobile is here.
By the end of the year half of all Americans will have smartphones.Most brand and marketers know this but haven’t put either
strategy or infrastructure in-place. Mobility changes almost everything.
Smartphones have
replaced PCs, watches, rolodexes, maps, cameras, game devices, remote
controls, landlines, books, boarding passes, coupons and loyalty cards. And
they are closing in on wallets. People spend as much time with their phones as
they do with TV.
Smartphones are an
appendage for younger consumers. They are their phones, which are very
personal, heavily customized and in constant use. Don’t be surprised if Levi’s
or Lees creates jeans with a special quick-draw phone pocket, which also
prevents inadvertent butt dialing.
Apps are “hit” driven.
There are millions of them. They rise into and fall out of fashion as quickly
as the Top 40. The average person has 40 on their phone but only really uses
8-10. Getting onto a consumer’s phone is tough. Staying on is even tougher. A
successful app must either provide instant utility or repeatable entertainment.
Open beats closed
systems.Android is ascendant and will continue to be because it’s becoming
ubiquitous. Apple may have a few tricks up its sleeve, but bet on Android, and
many variations of Android, across devices and geographies to ultimately
dominate.
Soon apps and native phone technologies will work together
and talk to each other. Think about how interoperability might impact your
business.
For example, the accelerometer notices you are walking funny
and double checks with the pedometer. The GPS pipes up and says you’re off
course on your way home. The med app then quickly checks your heart rate and
blood pressure, and then signals the Walgreen’s app to reorder your meds.
Context Matters.
Where you are (location) and what you’re doing (attention) determine your mood
and your openness to brands. “ Your customer is not the same person when they
wake up as when they are working mid-day – each persona has different needs and
desires.”
Americans are putting computers in their pockets and
expecting them to work and add value on-demand. Brands have to ask themselves,
“ Are you interrupting them or making life a little better?” To the extent that consumers use your app, you
have an always-on virtual private network (VPN) connection to them. You have to
respect this, insure privacy and use it sparingly.
There is great opportunity for first movers to claim mind
and heart space and an equal opportunity to frustrate, annoy and alienate. When
you’re in, you’re in till you blow it. When you’re out; you’re out for good.
The implications of these facts are staggering and
challenging, especially for brands used to dominating their category, setting
the product or sales agenda or deciding the communications cadence to their
customers.
In order to harness mobility, brands must master these 5 moves.
Think Differently.
Forrester put it this way. “In 2013, the
ultra-connected consumer base will continue to grow at a staggering pace,
destabilizing marketing as you’ve come to know it. These customers demand
personalized, relevant attention, designed around their needs and wants rather
than around your marketing channels. If you don’t change the way you think
about engaging these customers, you will quickly lose relevance.”
Surrender Control.
Interested and loyal customers prefer to drive the relationship. Enable them to
set preferences for all aspects of their interactions with the brand. Let them
tell you how often they want to hear from, what channels they prefer and which products
or services they care about most. Ask permission to use location, purchase
history and other data to customize their experiences.
The guys at Urbanairship
point out the marketing paradox. “When customers have the control to customize
and limit a brand’s messages, they become more engaged. Less is more. Brands
that focus on relevance over reach and value over frequency build enduring
relationships and outpace the competition.”
Target Context.
Think about lifestyles, life stages, time of day and the customer journey with
a UX and a service-oriented mindset. Smartphones and tablets are used to do
distinct tasks – check an account, make a payment, find directions, grab a
coupon, research a restaurant, compare prices, look up a word or a trivia fact
or check product specifications. Figure out what your best customers do, when
and where they do it and then map your brand to their lives.
Most of us are creatures of habit. We have predictable likes
and dislikes and identifiable routines and patterns that can cue marketers about
what we want.Where can you make things easier, simpler, faster, cheaper
or more fun? Then craft content and messaging to deliver them at these critical
inflection points.
Marketers need to collect, aggregate and process data to
enable your brand to push relevant messages at relevant times or locations to your
customers. Well designed “push” messages deliver increased app usage and brand
preference over time.
Don’t Sell.
Smartphones and tablets are personalized tools. Overt selling, especially
offers without opt-ins are strictly verboten. Brands can deepen the
relationship by providing, utility, value and content, which, if done right,
pre-sells products and services and engenders significantly more awareness,
consideration and preference than traditional advertising.
This requires nerves of steel and a bit of faith, especially
if you’re on the hook for increased revenue or margins. But we are seeing the
limits of and a backlash to SMS ads, in-app ads and social ads today.
Selling is not so much about buying a product or service.
It’s about buying into the gestalt, ecosystem, values and personality of a
brand. These intangibles are best nurtured with personalized, relevant and
useful content as much as deals, offers and coupons. There’s no happier customer
than one who gets a pointed, personal message from a brand they love, at the
time and through the channel they’ve chosen, with an offer about something they
want.
Make it Easy.
People get frustrated with technology in a nanosecond. Invest in user
experience and responsive design. Make sure that your brand assets render and
display properly on all devices and that accessing your content, offers and
products is easy, intuitive and quick. People on the move have ridiculously
high expectations for instant gratification. When you meet them, you gain a
special, but fleeting, moment of love. If you frustrate them; you are over and
out.
Making it easy also will require substantial investments in
database software, CRM tools and other IT resources that can interact with
consumers in real time and in the moment. IT and marketing must be joined and
aligned at the hip. Increasingly brands will be judged by their ability to
deliver what an individual wants on demand. Given where most of us are today,
it’s a tall order.
Mobility has transformed e-mail. Unfortunately too many
brands haven’t kept pace. As a result, they
squander the power and impact of the most ubiquitous and most effective digital
communications channel because messages don’t render properly or links
drive users to pages that can’t be read or properly interacted
with.
Ninety percent of e-mail subscribers access the same e-mail account
on multiple devices. Between 15 and 65 percent of e-mails are opened on these
devices, according to the guys at emailmonday,
often at different locations and with expectations than before. Savvy marketers
are using “sniffers” to identify the universe
of devices and/or turning to responsive design to automatically adapt and
resize e-mail creative and technology for maximum impact.
Everybody has to factor in basic changes. Mobile screens
have different dimensions, usually smaller and narrower. You have to put the
most important thing up top. Mobile users are on the go. They scan. They spend
less time per e-mail so they need to get to the point faster and need different
response mechanisms. You are getting partial attention and the flick of a thumb
rather than a full screen, two focused eyes and ten fingers or a mouse for response
agility.
Your call to action must be clear and BIG. Increase the
point size of text so it can be seen in any light and from any angle. Buttons,
links and other response mechanisms need to be presented early and enlarged to
account for fat fingers and finger faults. Put a link to your mobile website in
the pre-header to offer an option to read the e-mail in the browser.
Be sure that any destination is equally mobile friendly.
Think about the entire experience from transmission/reception to interaction to
destination/desired action. If you break any part of the chain, you essentially
dump your customer or prospect. Too many e-mails opened on mobile devices take
customers to pages that don’t work or look awful when they
get there. Just kiss off those customers.
The expectation of frictionless mobility combined with an
in-the-moment intensity of interest amplifies the emotional reaction to your
message. When it works its pure brand mojo. When it doesn’t
your brand takes a bigger hit than if your e-mail doesn’t
work right on a desktop or laptop. The good news is that simple planning and
fixes allow you to maximize customer satisfaction.
Mobile marketers can learn a lot from the first mobile
advertising medium – radio. And while the notion sounds retrograde, long
established consumer behavior has simply shifted from one device to another.
Bleeding edge mobile savants need to pay attention to the not-so-distant past.
Consumers brought their analog habits to the mobile digital world.
Radio, like mobile media, has only two key functions; time
saving or time wasting. “Utility and entertainment or death” could easily be a
shared marketing motto since on-the-go consumers want what they need instantly,
have no patience for technical glitches and can be disappointed and gone in a
nanosecond. Customer expectations created by mobility are extremely fickle. It’s
not the technology; it’s service and relevance in the moment that counts.
Consider these 4 lessons from our radio brethren.
We are creatures of
habit. We get up and need
stimulation. We commute and need to be either distracted, informed or calmed. And
often we need companionship to fall asleep. AM and PM drive times are
hard-wired behaviors. Content and devices can be targeted and timed to enhance
and to intersect consumers’ day-to-day routines. The better integrated content
and devices are into lifestyles and work routines; the better the marketing
result.
We rely on mood
elevators. We are creatures governed by biorhythms that can be affected by
sound, sight and content. People turn to music, imagery, news, sports and
combative talk to change things up. Content impacts and regulates body
chemistry, stress levels and happiness. Understanding and using these levers,
brands can delight consumers. Mobile marketers can provide background and
ambient cues or take center stage and drive attention and emotion if they
understand who is tuned in, what their frame of mind is, where they are and
what they need.
We are our
demographics. Birds of a feather flock together. Most people’s musical
tastes are locked-in by the time they are 16 and are predictable based on age,
geography, income and education. The people who love Rush Limbaugh or Howard
Stern are decidedly different. Different musical genres, design and display
formats, content areas and messaging techniques appeal to different audience
segments. One size never fits all. Mobile media needs to be programmed like
cable TV or radio by deeply understanding and appealing to the psychology,
demographics, sensibilities and lifestyles of thin audience slices. It’s all
about how the content resonates with the target customer.
Everything is local.
The FCC artificially limited the range of radio stations in the licensing
process. And even though wireless mobile devices can work almost anywhere, a
10-mile radius bounds most lives. Geo-fencing is a new term but hardly a new
concept. Proximity, familiarity and convenience drive behavior. Mobile content
has to leverage GPS and other emerging technologies to connect needs with
nearby handy solutions.
And while mobile is the newest media darling, the principles
that will drive its success as a commercial medium are as old as Marconi.
I have seen the post-Groupon SoLoMo retail solution. It’s
called Leloca.
And it’s running a Beta in New York with
1000+ consumers and 200+ restaurants, spas, gyms and shops. It simply and
elegantly delivers the universal technology promise; immediate value exchanges between
merchants and consumers and, in so doing, joins Zipcar and Airbnb in
efficiently using technology to allocate time sensitive resources.
Founded by Douglas Krone, a sushi-eating, dog loving
Northwestern grad and serial entrepreneur, Leloca has a development team in
India and 15 employees smiling and dialing to enroll merchants in Chicago.
The mobile app is designed to sell available inventory,
mostly restaurant seats, in real time. Merchants determine when, where and what
they want to offer and set the parameters in a simple dashboard. Consumers get
alerts and offers from the app. Merchants get free listings and pay just $1 per
customer, validated and tracked by a unique code issued directly to each
participating customer.
For retailers, Leloca gives sophisticated yield management tools
to smaller retailers with no investment in technology. Using a simple
interface, merchants set the offer, the number of deals available, the time
parameters and the geographic target. Some select a near-in trading zone;
others opt for an exclusion zone to attract new customers from adjacent areas.
Unlike Groupon, there’s no revenue share, no required
loss-leader offer and no opportunity cost. And during the beta period, new
merchants get 3 months of free service.
For 116 million US smartphone users, especially the 8.9% who
use their devices to seek out discounts or offers, the always-on iOS or Android
app feeds you deals. There are no vouchers, no credit cards needed and no fine
print. Deals are pushed to you. If you bite, you get a code that is live for 45
minutes and redeemed at the point of sale. It’s exclusively mobile, immediate
and easy.
The next wave of apps uses GPS and mapping linked to a rules
engine platform to create productive in-the-moment experiences. They require
little or no effort from consumers and can be shared via social networks to
enable frictionless retailing.
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