The importance of remaining relevant with mobile phone users

Grant Leboff: So Steve, one of the areas I wanted to talk to you about today is of course mobile, because you know, since apple launched the iPhone back in 2007, this thing is now just taken off and it’s becoming the major channel for so many businesses to market because at the end of the day, the mobiles are saying that people have got them with them 24/7, and they’re looking at it all the time. So where do you see the landscape going with that? Where are the opportunities, as you see them, for businesses?

Steve Barton: To think about mobile really as a device, not as a mobile telephone. And I have to admit my own bias here because I still think of my mobile as an incredibly personal device, even though I use it primarily for business. And I remember in research on some research on financial services being quite stunned to learn that people were happy having what I would consider, potentially invasive messaging as long as it was relevant. So, for example, I don’t mind if a bank texts me, if they’re telling me that there’s a savings product I could use because I have a certain amount of money extra at the end of the month, or perhaps more poignantly, if I’m about to go over drawn, a little warning message. People quite valued that because it was very personal and if you will, there was a specific benefit in it for them. But my God, if you go the other direction, say, oh I’ve got this new credit card in the blah blah blah rate and they’re not in the market, they get quite offended. And the, there’s almost a real marmite or a binery effect. It’s much more so than you get in a lot of other mediums.

Grant Leboff:  I think, so I think we were highlighting areas there. There is this recognition that there’s almost nothing more personal than your mobile phone, because you go with it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So while it’s incredibly powerful for a business to be able to communicate via that mechanism, there is an inherent danger that if you get it wrong and you’re getting really upset people. And I suppose that comes under the importance of relevance. I wrote a blog post in a while ago where I said the most, the cardinal sin of marketing today is to be irrelevant, because we live in a world where we screen everything out. I mean, so some of the serendipity of life’s disappearing as we kind of make everything just right for us. You know, we download an MP3 album and we take out the two tracks we don’t like so we never listened to that anymore. We download a newspaper, but we missed out that section cause we’re not interested in that. So everything’s very, very sort of tailored to us, which in a way has to be to manage the flow of information that we’re all trying to cope with. But on the other hand, it means from a marketing point of view, you’ve just got to maintain that relevance. So, how do you think businesses can achieve that in a mobile device? How do they make sure that they don’t cross that line and lose any goodwill they already have?

Steve Barton: I started with the customer perspective. Go back to that financial services example we were talking about a minute ago. It’s really understanding that if there’s a service in it or, or support, that’s all right. I’m quite fascinated at the moment with a lot of the shopping applications that are coming out, where you can effectively take a shot and pass it to your friends and ask them; my bum looks big in this… but all the way through to actually getting a model of your size. ‘Fits me’ [https://fits.me/] is a brand that does this, and then have more confidence about the clothes you’re buying and seeing what they’ll look like based on a model of your size. And then these are quite interesting things cause these are things you can access when you’re in the shop or trying on the clothes and get a real time value, real time benefit. But they all track back to that moment of customer need, I suppose.