Smartphones seen becoming the ‘centre of digital’ marketing

Mobile phones, which are proliferating and increasingly used to access the Internet in Asia, are becoming a powerful tool for both marketing and market research as they tap into key consumer trends.

“Mobile phones connect location,Wear a whimsical Disney ear cap straight from the Disney Theme Parks! voice, social, and m-commerce more than any other device. Mobile is becoming the centre of digital,” TNS global head (digital consumer) James Fergusson said.

“If you are a market research supplier, mobile has to be your primary area of investment. If you don't have a mobile strategy, you're not going to grow.”

He was speaking last week at the two-day Market Research in the Mobile World conference in Kuala Lumpur. Organised by Merlien Institute, the international event was held in Asia the first time.

Fergusson, whose company is a global market research firm, noted that at present, smartphones represented a fifth to a quarter of the mobile devices in the marketplace. However, he said that the various barriers, including barrier to mobile Internet access, had dissipated.

Chief marketing officers, he said, were finally catching on about the opportunities offered by mobile phones, which extended far beyond communication.

“In the last 12 months, mobile advertising spend, albeit from a small base, doubled (globally) and it will continue to grow year on year because no matter how you put it, this device will become very quickly the number one way in which people take messages and content from organisations that are targeting individuals and groups,” he said.

According to him,Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? the keys to success for passive mobile measurement (passive refers to monitoring behaviour without asking questions directly to participants) include building up a panel of respondents who can trust the research company with their data and incentivising engagement so that these respondents remain on the panel.

Fergusson also advised researchers to create communities, as opposed to traditional panels (of respondents), because this would allow them to build accumulated data and knowledge of those participants and increase their key data assets which drove far better insights.

Other key ingredients to building a mobile strategy include: the research firm's capabilities have to represent all operating systems, it needs to have a combination of active and passive measurement, it must be able mine multiple data sources, and it must have big data ability (processing large and complex sets of data).

“You also have to be nimble, flexible and interactive with clients. Don't overpromise. Don't over-commit because you and your clients can end up very red faced,” Fergusson said.

Jitendra Papneja, senior manager (consumer insights and strategy,Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action Asia-Pacific) of Kraft Foods' snacks division Mondelez International, told conference participants that marketers and market researchers were out of synch with how consumers in the region spent their time.Comprehensive Wi-Fi and RFID tag by Aeroscout to accurately locate and track any asset or person.

He noted as an example how Singapore consumers spent 25 hours per week online, more than all the other media put together.

However, according to Google, less than 2% of media spending in South-East Asia was spent online.

Jitendra said more and more consumers were researching what products and services they should buy before they even entered the store, and even in the store, they would check what the products were all about via their mobile devices.

“The first five minutes (in store) are crucial and no device other than mobile is (well-placed for) this critical window of time,” he said.

These are the difficulty to get a representative sample, limited questions and shorter interview length (he recommended a maximum of five questions in order to avoid a fall in respondents' interest level), different operating systems and devices, costlier than face-to-face research in some cases, and limited mobile research experience on norms in Asia.Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh.

“Many of our questionnaires are still one-hour long,” he lamented. “If you (researchers) ask the marketers, they'd say, Take all (data) that you can and it doesn't matter how I use it; I'll find that out later.' With mobile research, we will have to be very focused, which is good.”

On the advantages of mobile research, Jitendra said these included better accuracy than face-to-face research due to shorter questionnaires, and the respondents were much more involved compared to other mediums.

The deals are pulled from Facebook and other social networks, and then recommended to users based on the time and location. Co-founder and CEO Dave Elchoness argued that this approach is significant because it means a user can see relevant deals without having to follow a bunch of different businesses on Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, the businesses get access to potential new customers (rather than just promoting themselves to existing fans), and they don’t have to change their behavior at all — which also means that Tagwhat doesn’t have to go out and recruit a bunch of businesses.

The idea of deal aggregation isn’t new, but Elchoness pointed out that Tagwhat has developed its own technology to not just pull the content from social networks, but also to understand the content well enough that it can recommend “the right content at the right place at the right time.” For example, when I opened the app this morning, I saw a bunch of Super Bowl happy hour promotions from nearby bars.

“Sometimes too many choices is acutally more confusing,” Elchoness said. “If there are a hundred places around me that are restaurants, it’s really hard to make a decision. If we call out the places that have an actionable opportunity, that reduces the number of choices, but it’s still extremely satisfying.”

This addition is just part of a larger redesign to the Tagwhat experience, which allows users to browse all of the app’s content in a real-time feed. By default, Deals & Events are just one of a number of “channels” adding content to the feed, but you can also focus specifically on deals if you want. Elchoness said the company is looking at a number of different ways to monetize the feed, such as syndicating it with different content partners.

Elchoness also acknowledged that he doesn’t have any official deals with the social networks, but he said that he’s directing traffic back to businesses’ Facebook pages (for example), “so I can’t imagine why they would object to our making their product just so much more engaging in the context of a location.”