Archive for the ‘mobile ecosystem’ Category

The Future of Retail is Now

By , Apr 12, 2013

Traditional retail in the U.S. is under attack by eCommerce and mCommerce. By allowing for a broader assortment of inventory, easier access to comparison product information and better purchasing options, these new shopping methods are continuing to grow faster than traditional retail. Although it only accounts for a fraction of annual US retail sales, the numbers are steadily climbing.

Forrester GraphIn a great presentation, The Future of Retail, on BusinessInsider, Kim Bhasin and  Ashley Lutz analyze the growth of these new shopping methods, how traditional retail is fighting back with their own eCommerce and mcommerce options and how the story is really about giving consumers what they really want which is low prices, a  customized and personalized shopping experience and excellent customer service.

eCommerce
eCommerce will grow by double the rate over onsite retail (10%+ vs. 5%) over the next few years and continues to be dominated by a few top retailers, led by Amazon, Apple and then mostly traditional stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy.  The online retailers are continuing to innovate introducing same day purchasing and local vending machines.

mCommerce
Mobile devices are further altering the retail landscape. It is projected that by 2017, mobile retail will comprise 9% of the ecommerce landscape, a whopping $31 billion and growing. Comparison shopping sites like Groupon have successfully changed the way we shop online. As mobile continues the rise, so too does the use of the mobile wallet. In a recent blog post, we looked at the Google Wallet experience, and the results were much better than  expected but mobile wallet front-runners face new solutions from traditional retailers.

Traditional Retail
Consumers are fed up with traditional retail with higher prices, lack of inventory, disinterested sales people and are using showrooming as a tool to meet their need for information and better service. Retailers have woken up to this displeasure. Over the past year, retailers have been able to push back on the gains made by eCommerce and mCommerce by making the shopping experience more experiential and introducing own mobile apps. For example, JCPenney has even gone as far as saying they’d like to see the elimination of the cashier operated cash register in the near future, and Urban Outfitters is following suit.

Showrooming
Most experts agree, the “showrooming” phenomenon is real. Interestingly enough, although only 17% of consumers were aware of what showrooming is, 36% agreed they’d done it upon learning the definition. In the case of clothing, showrooming seems very logical. People want to try things on and see how they look and feel before making a decision to buy. The convenience now is that consumers no longer need to return to the store in order to complete the process. The brick and mortar store is an experiential center, it is where we go to interact with the brand, to feel, touch, and see it.

It's Really All About the Consumer
Consumers are looking for tools and options in their shopping experience that allow them to do the following things; save money, save time and provide ideas. For many customers what is most important is face to face customer service. Apple stores are basically a giant customer service desk and their success is causing retailers to change their focus. Traditional stores have customer service in the corner near the entrance but this is the wrong strategy. The customer service desk should be very visible in the middle of the store and omnipresent through mobile apps. The online and offline shopping worlds should not be siloed, but instead be tightly connected.

The shopping experience is changing for the better; more personalized, more efficient and hopefully more enjoyable. More retailers should take the opportunity, especially in the area of mobile, to keep their brand front and center with their customers.

Optism Top 5 Blog Posts of 2012: Tap In to the Power of Digital Moms

By , Feb 4, 2013

Note: Optism is republishing our five most popular blog posts of last year, this was number #3  for 2012 and was originally published on July 13, 2012.

Digital Moms in the US are an increasingly important demographic for marketers. Mothers are accumulating more wealth and making more shopping choices and using more technology than the average person. Digital moms are more likely to be owners of smartphones and more likely to consult others when making purchase decisions.

How should mobile marketers tap into this important segment?

Here are a number of mobile stats that can help marketers effectively market to digital moms.

Moms have money. An article from Asking Smarter Questions provides some key statistics about both women and mothers. Moms represent a $2.4 trillion market in the US. By 2028, the average American woman is expected to earn more than the average American male. Women are earning, spending, and influencing spending at a greater rate than ever before, accounting for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending in the US. Women are making more than 85% of all consumer purchases, including more than 50% of traditional male products, such as  cars, power tools and consumer electronics.

Moms are socially connected via mobile. In a study by NM Incite, at least half of moms use social media via mobile devices, compared to 37% of the online population. In an article from Asking Smarter Questions, 64% of moms ask other mothers for advice before they purchase a new product and 63% of all mothers surveyed consider other moms the most credible experts when they have questions. Additionally, 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others. Moms are using Facebook and Pinterest to share tips, product recommendations and shopping deals with their friends.

Moms are savvy and connected shoppers. Moms are 70% more likely to download online coupons from retail marketing websites and 65% more likely to download coupons from a manufacturer’s website than the average person. Additionally, 92% of moms pass along information about shopping deals or finds to others. 55% of moms who use social media daily said they made their purchase because of a recommendation from a personal review blog. Almost 20 million online moms will read blogs and 1 in 3 bloggers are moms. 77% of mom bloggers will only write about products or brands whose reputations they approve of, and another 14% will write about brands or products they boycott.

Moms are demanding mobile users. Nielsen says that some 54% of American moms are using smartphones: considering that the US population just tipped 50 percent for smartphone ownership that means mothers are more likely to be smart phone owners. Additionally, moms are about twice as likely to own either a smartphone or a tablet compared to other women.

Moms have a love/hate relationship with technology. In a Yahoo and Starcom MediaVest Group study, 71% of moms said that technology was part of family together time, while 52% said that technology was a distraction.

Not all digital moms are the same. Advertising Agency MWW surveyed 1,000 moms to better understand their use of digital and social media. They found five digital mom archetypes; Mobilizers (Younger, hyper-connected moms using mobile), Urban Originals (influential taste-makers), Practical Adopters (working moms who use technology to stay ahead), Casual Connectors (Older moms who use mobile technology to connect with their kids), Wallflowers (Younger moms who are consumers of media). Providing multiple means to connect with these subgroups is important.

Moms are more likely to shop online. Women account for 58% of all total online spending and 22% shop online at least once a day according to Asking Smarter Questions.

Moms are more likely to become a fan or follow a brand online. When using social media, moms are 38 percent more likely to become a fan of or follow a brand online, and moms who blog are more than twice as likely to follow brands and celebrities compared to the online average.

Conclusion

Digital Moms are mobile-equipped, multi-tasking, socially-connected, family-protecting, brand-loyal, savvy-shoppers. They are well informed consumers who share what they know with other mothers.  What are the keys to tapping into the digital mom juggernaut? Be relevant and authentic. Meet them online where they are. Provide moms with tools, lists and apps to help them manage their lives. Take the time to understand their needs, build their trust and deliver on your promises and you just might be lucky enough to have a new army of brand loyalists.

Are Mobile Payments Really About Payments?

By , Feb 1, 2013

Note: This blog post was originally posted on Mobile Payments Today.

Especially in banked markets, where payment card penetration is often above the hundred percent, we have all learned to recognize that mobile payments needs to be more then “mobilizing” payments by changing the form factor from plastic card to a digital format on a handset. The market needs more to drive consumer and merchant adoption.

Most suppliers of mobile payment solutions do apply a strategy to go beyond payments by offering value ad to both the consumer and merchants in the form of offers, deals, and coupons which save money for the consumer while generating traffic and boosting sales for the merchant. Mobile payments are no longer just about payments, but rather are shifting to a full commerce experience. Google Wallet, Square, Groupon, ISIS, Weve, Paypass Wallet –  name a payment initiative and “payment and offers” or “consumer engagement and merchant sales activation” will be in their pitch.

Will consumers soon face an avalanche of offers and coupons each time they step out of the door or pass a brick-and-mortar store? Will we face “offer fatigue?”

And if the industry is moving altogether toward an advertising driven innovation of payments, where will be the differentiation points?

Two-side business model

First of all, it is not easy to market a value proposition to both merchants and consumers simultaneously, simply because lots of players are good at only reaching one of these market segments.

Card issuers have a link with the consumer, but not with merchants. Acquirers have a strong retail footprint, but have no direct connection with the consumer base. Typically MNOs have strong consumer assets, but not all of them (especially Tier 2 players) have strong enterprise units to sell solutions to retail or long-tail merchants.

Here a partner strategy is required, such as the French telcos creating a joint venture with IT provider ATOS so they can jointly market the mobile payment app Buyster to consumers (telcos) and merchants (ATOS).

Even Google, despite its advertising ecosystem and consumer reach, has continuously attempted to adapt its Google Wallet partner strategy to foster merchant acceptance for offer redemptions. The latest rumors point to a Discover companion card for acceptance and easy redemption of coupon and payment transactions on non-NFC terminals.

Organizations with a two-sided business model and customer base have an inherent advantage to foster adoption of mcommerce. Take American Express, which is issuing cards and controlling its acceptance network directly and is quite successful in marketing their Serve solution. MCX, the retail venture created by more than a dozen top retailers in the U.S., can scale given the consumer access from their members and the obvious acceptance of their mcommerce app at all participating chains.

Consumer data to guarantee relevance

Consumers look to their mobile phone as a highly intimate device. As a consumer, we don’t like to receive intrusive notifications if there isn’t a key value. And we don’t want to expose personal context without consent and control. But if brands or retailers want to engage consumers with highly valuable and relevant offers an in-depth understanding of the consumers’ interests and context is required.

Who knows best how to recruit consumer opt-ins? And who possesses the best data to provide highest relevance?

Mobile operators have access to big data pools. They know the key socio-demographics from post-pay subscribers and own significant traffic patterns including where we are and to whom we are connected (as well as which apps we use, sites we browse, people we call). But they lack our purchase behaviour, and without consent, telco data can only be used in an anonymous way (e.g. retailers can work with operators to get anonymized analytics on the demographics of the consumers passing a certain location to make commercial decisions).

Opt-in rates for permission based marketing services vary. Carrier O2 in the U.K. is seen as a success story with more than 50 percent of their consumer base opted-in for permission based targeted marketing.

Card issuers sit on transactional data pools and start to build opt-in pools so they can deliver card linked offers to stimulate card use and retention.

Retailers know real purchase behavior at the item level, but lack information from the “outside.”

Google has our search and browsing behaviour but lacks context information from the real world.

So, all of the above players have a sound amount of data to derive profiles, but all miss a key component. Therefore, they are positioning themselves in the mobile payment and wallet space: mobile payments can be an enabler for them to fill-in a missing piece of information about a consumer.

Mobile operators hope to get visibility on transactions to enrich their consumer data. Google is funding part of the payment transactions initiated via the Google Wallet to tap into the payment value chain and track brick and mortar purchase behaviour. And card issuers get real-time context including location.

And that is the real game: mobile wallets don’t need to be the money maker as long as they can help in collecting the missing piece of consumer data. Monetization will follow in multiple ways, such as within the wallet, in form of relevant offers, and also across existing products. (For example, Google can provide superior ad products from search to coupon clipping and redemption tracking.)

It’s all about the data!

Anthony Belpaire is managing alliances for the Alcatel-Lucent mCommerce Business Unit. Alcatel-Lucent mCommerce supplies digital media, mobile advertising and payment solutions to telecom operators to enhance the monetization of their subscriber assets. Mobile commerce solutions typically glue an eco-system together of payment issuers, advertisers, merchant acquirers, telcos.

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