Digital mobile space - why should you own it

Articles

Mobile Articles

Most commented articles

A few years ago a small band of entrepreneurial sales people started visiting large corporate organisations across South Africa, selling what seemed like an intangible product. The going was tough and many of the corporate managers scoffed at the sales pitches. The idea of owning a portion of virtual space that your customers could access at any time to find out about your company seemed incomprehensible to many managers – the virtual shop front.

The product itself was somewhat reliable and the numbers of actual consumers were very few.

That product was a website on the World Wide Web.

The thinking was that so few people owned computers and those that did were either techno nerds (geeks was not a common term then) or accountants.

In the 14 years that the World Wide Web has been operational, the 10 largest online companies have produced annualised incomes of over US$35 billion. There is not a single company that is serious about its business that does not have a website. What happened to those managers that scoffed at the web? We are in the middle of a similar revolutionary period within the mobile industry.

Race is on

This is the race to own digital mobile space in a retail environment. Mobile phone functionality has progressed past personal communication. Mobile phones have become portals to access customers. Organisations that leverage the mobile environment can now secure the customer not only of the future but in the future.

The full extent of this leveraging action is yet to be determined, but judging by what is currently in development, we will soon see mini-applications loaded onto mobile phones which enable customers to pay for goods and services via their phones within a mall environment. This will give large mall environments the opportunity to secure the customer by creating their own brand of mobile applications and embedding this onto customer mobile phones.

These applications will also be used to determine customer preferences and to give the mall the ability to target customers according to their personal choices. This will then ensure that a customer is retained by the mall that panders to their personal needs and requirements. The need for the retailer to own not only the physical space in the mall but also the digital mobile space has now become reality.

Not a billboard

Digital mobile space as a media channel is not a billboard and it cannot be treated within the same business model. Do not lose control of the digital mobile space due to lack of understanding of this exciting new channel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Petros Kondos (petrosk@wcit.co.za) is co-founder and CEO of Wireless Customer Interactive Technologies (www.wcit.co.za), which launched in 2004 and mainly focuses on providing Bluetooth location-based marketing systems. Petros specialises in alternate mobile media communication as seen from a customer relationship management context, and as the marketing brain behind WCIT, has twice been an invited guest speaker in Europe on the subject.

[13 Mar 2007 15:37]