by Steven Keith Platt
Director, Platt Retail Institute
Mobile marketing offers an outstanding potential as a retail in-store marketing channel. Communicating marketing messages to consumers via a hand-held phone by SMS (short messaging service) and MMS (multimedia messaging services) allows for extremely personal, highly targeted one-to-one messaging. Its impact on consumer behavior can be accurately measured and because nearly all consumers have mobile phones, the capital cost associated with enabling the media is limited.
In a retail context, mobile marketing can be utilized both for the delivery of messages inside a store and in the vicinity of a store, such as in front of a store or in a mall. Consumer response to mobile marketing can be challenging. Due to the personal nature associated with one’s cell phone, issues arise such as the time and place messages are received. For example, consumers may be open to receiving a beer promotion while at a ball game, but not so happy to receive the same message while in line at the bank. In addition, if the message isn’t relevant, it may not only fail to have an impact, it could also create negative feelings toward the brand.
In an out-of-home setting, mounting a mobile marketing campaign involves various complexities that are not present In-Store. These include the building of an opt-in database (to ensure acceptance), mining of that database to align messages with the recipient (to ensure relevance), as well as connectivity issues. In an In-Store environment, most of these issues do not exist. The building of a database is not a requirement as consumers In-Store will opt-in to receive mobile marketing messages in response to static and digital signage offers that they find of interest. Such elective opt-in will also ensure relevance since consumers will only act in response to messages they find of interest.
Some possible applications of mobile marketing in an In-Store environment include:
●Delivering promotional messages, such as coupons and advertisements
●Providing product information, such as features and attributes, location and way-finding, and associated products, such as a parts list for the do-it-yourselfer
●Enhancing customer service, such as a payment method to enable faster checkouts, to place orders in advance, or to receive notice when an order is complete
●Improving customer loyalty, such as a complement to a rewards program to deliver member benefits, such as exclusive savings, event alerts and other tailored information based upon customer interests (for example, Meijer piloted a program to alert consumers to pending gas price increases in advance of becoming effective, enabling customers to stop by and fill up prior to the price increases.
Retailers considering using mobile marketing should focus on delivering relevant messages to consumers which are creative, entertaining and informative. Consumer acceptable of mobile marketing messages relates to how, when and where the message is received. If the consumer finds it intrusive, it will result in negative feelings from the message. In the context of a retail store, where the consumer opts in, this shouldn’t present an issue.
As consumers are bombarded with messages from various outlets, those delivered by mobile marketing must be relevant to garner consumer attention. And because of the highly personal nature of cell phones, these messages must also be welcome.
Additional information is available in the Third Quarter 2008 edition of Quarterly Retail Analytics, published by Platt Retail Institute.