Reaching Younger Shoppers with Smartphone Marketing
After attending the ICSC Recon Convention in Las Vegas, something became pretty clear to me. As more and more people use the Mobile Web to guide their offline purchasing decisions, brick and mortar retailers will only stand to benefit.
When e-commerce became popular about 13 years ago, there was a battle between online and offline sales. Both practices seemed deadlocked in a struggle for the same customer. Many large retailers jumped into the e-commerce game only after they realized that they must embrace the new technology and sell their inventories to shoppers who never set foot inside physical stores. For some retailers, the process of formulating, implementing, and refining an e-commerce strategy took years.
Fast forward 13 years later, and there isn’t a retailer in sight that doesn’t sell it’s own products online. Well, maybe there are a few holdouts, but what has changed since 1997? People have become more comfortable with the concept of their credit card information whizzing through cyberspace in secure and encrypted environments. Also, the number of users who have shopped their entire lives making purchases online has grown. And that group is continuing to expand.
But my prediction is this: as the web evolves, and the number of smart phone users grow, both will have a great future impact on offline sales for retailers, as opposed to just more point-and-click purchases.
As the web becomes more mobile and social interactions continue to revolve around handheld devices, the research that shoppers conduct before making purchases will get closer to the point of sale. If the average Internet user was miles from a store when she researched a product online (usually at her desktop computer), now that average user with a smart phone in hand might only be meters away from making that same purchase, whether from the parking lot, the food court at the mall, or the store next door.
Mobile-assisted purchases will satisfy the shopper’s immediate gratification associated with offline purchases. Items will be purchased without waiting for items to be shipped. Additionally, the more challenging sale of items like clothing and shoes will only stand to benefit if shoppers can use the web to find out about special local deals and try the product on before making the purchase, creating a more researched and confident sale than ever before.
It all comes down to a shopper feeling as though she has made an informed decision to purchase. If she has stumbled upon something she might like, but hasn’t researched the product, she’ll most likely browse, but pass. If she feels in control of the process and has found a great deal that fits, she will make the purchase. Smart phone shopping will close the gap between the brick and mortar window shoppers and the Internet savvy, ready-to-purchase shoppers that retailers have been targeting online for the last 13 years.
Apple Supplants Microsoft
A lot has changed over the last decade, in 1997, Microsoft was the dominant personal computer company. Now, based upon market cap, Apple has supplanted them. In the 1990’s, Microsoft’s battle cry was: “A Computer on Every Desktop”. They won that battle in spades. But their mission seems to have stalled. Over the last 8 years or so, Apple’s underlying mission has been “A Computer in Every Hand”. It started with the iPod, and has evolved to include the iPhone and iPad.
It makes me think about Steve Balmer’s reaction when Apple started to roll out their iPhone. As the computing experience becomes more mobile and more intimate, a more personal interface and user experience is required. And consumers are willing to pay for it. Maybe that’s why Apple’s more friendly and personal interface has finally found it’s ideal platform and audience, the mobile consumer.
Changed the Name of the Blog
I changed the name of my blog from Mobile Coupon Musings to Armadealo Founder’s Blog because I’d like to write about pretty much whatever I feel like. If it relates to Armadealo, that’s a bonus. If not, stay tuned. Most of my entries should revolve around Armadealo and location based marketing. Why? Because location-based marketing is a very cool pursuit, and ties together two things I am very passionate about. Mobile communications, and Marketing.
I Found an Old Relic
I was digging through some old files on our web server and came across the first home page that we posted on armadealo.com. Sometimes the less said the better. In our efforts to get the point across sometimes we lose sight of the fact that most visitors to our sites will probably look at the site for less than a minute, so getting the point across as quickly as possible is key…
Our First Homepage
Skiing: The Smart Phone Experience
There’s no better way to try out new technologies than to go far afield and see what your handheld device can do for you. I had that opportunity last week when I went to Jackson Hole with some friends and found that all five of us carried iPhones. Skiing in a place as large as Jackson makes staying in touch with your fellow skiers tough, especially since we didn’t know the mountain that well. So, on the first night we eagerly downloaded Loopt , hoping that it would help us stay in touch on the mountain. After the first day, it sadly failed us. Not that the app was bad, it’s just that we utilized other methods on the phone to keep in touch, more basic functions. Loopt had to be running for us to use it, and we didn’t want to run it at the exclusion of other functions like iTunes and phone calls on the phone.
So we ended up relying on the following functions/hardware to stay in touch and enjoy ourselves on the mountain: phone calls, texts, photos and videos of our skiing, maps and GPS, iPod for music, and most especially, those great earphones(with microphone) that come with the iPhone. Their beauty in design really showed through up in the mountains. Surprisingly, one of the features I didn’t use was the compass, but that could have been more helpful in other circumstances. The takeaway on bringing the iPhone skiing is knowing that you have such a powerful tool in your hand to assist you should you get in trouble. My carrier (AT&T) covered the whole mountain. Imagine being able to GPS your Longitude and Latitude, and make a phone call to authorities to get picked up by helicopter before darkness sets in. Imagine being able to surf the web from your phone to get some survival techniques if you are forced to stay the night out in the mountains.
Along with a spot of water and a cliff bar in my parka pocket, each day I made sure that I had my iPhone and my apple headset. I would leave my iPhone in my pocket and command my phone through the simple click buttons that hung under the right earpiece at my jaw line. If I wanted to play music while waiting for my buddies, one click would do it. If I wanted to answer a phone call, the iPod Music would fade out and my ring would come in. Answering the call involved clicking a button on the headphones, so I didn’t have to unzip my jacket or fumble with my gloves while skiing. If a text came in from one of my friends indicating where he was at that point in time on the mountain, a beep could be heard over the music, but I had to stop and get my phone out to read the text. My iPhone became an integral part of my skiing experience.
Devil’s Advocate
Ok, I am going to play the devil’s advocate now. Many purists would argue that skiing is about getting away, not being hooked up to “the grid”, and staying aware, without music and other things as a distraction. They would argue that being aware would better insure that you don’t get into trouble in the first place. One local on the mountain pointed out that a tinder box is the best thing to have in case you get stuck in the wilderness. I can see his point of view. But I would simply argue that under-experienced outdoors people should bring a phone along for safety. They can just leave it off until it is needed in a dire emergency they want to experience the beauty and sounds of the wilderness.
Apple Please Update Your Headphones
- Voice commands have to improve. At one point in time the ambient noise from my microphone was trying to control my phone by voice command. All it was doing was fast-forwarding the music on my iPhone, and I couldn’t use a voice command to make it stop! Something like “STOP VOICE COMMAND” would have been very useful in this circumstance. Another good command would be “START VOICE COMMAND”. Then from there, “PHONE CALL>CALL PAUL SMITH”, or “CHECK TEXT MESSAGE”.
- I’d love to be able to review a text sent to my phone using only my headphones and voice command. The pertinent information would be who the text is from and what the message is. Then I wouldn’t have to stop skiing, take off my gloves, unzip my jacket and pocket, and check the message.
- Caller ID into the headphones would be very helpful too.
60 Days on the iTunes Store
The first sixty days that the Armadealo Mobile Coupon App has been available on the Apple iTunes Store has been nothing short of eye opening. When we started thinking about mobile coupons and their effectiveness as a means for retailers to market promotions and discounts to shoppers on the go, we never expected that the results would turn out as well as they did. The statistics that we are now gathering confirm our initial theories about their efficacy as compared to print coupons, and even online coupons that one gets off of a web site, prints, and brings to a merchant. The sessions per user, coupons viewed per user, and other mouthwatering statistics stream in on a daily basis to confirm what we believed (but until now had no data to confirm). We now have data that quantifies the mobile coupon opportunity.
The elegance of the system that the Armadealo team has created is something of which I am very proud. The system publishes an offer, promotion, or coupon, and that offer gets “beamed” to users of Armadealo who are within 100 miles of each and every retail location for a particular merchant. And anyone who is using Armadealo has not only opted-in to receive the offer, but is actively shopping at that point in time. That makes the user much more receptive to not only viewing the offer, but also acting upon that offer.
New Tablet From Apple
Apple will deliver the goods on its much anticipated tablet computer, due to be introduced in Q1 of 2010. It will look and behave like an oversized iPod touch. How this device might plug into home accessories is of great interest to me. I like this idea, especially when it comes to a keyboard. When I purchased my first iPhone a year ago, I found the keyboard on the screen to be the most difficult aspect of the smart phone to get used to. I think that purchasers of the new Apple Tablet who don’t own an iPhone or iPod Touch will have the same initial complaint.
If I had an Apple tablet, and the ability to use a regular keyboard when I am at home, that would make the MacBook I am typing on right now obsolete. But I await to see if the tablet has global positioning. Hopefully, global positioning will be a big part of that device. After all, why wouldn’t Apple include GPS, an accelerometer, and a compass? They are the things that make the Apple hand-held devices so popular. Zip codes are out as a key piece of information, because people now take their most powerful computing devices with them wherever they go. What’s more important? Where I live, or where I am am right now?
