Research: Creating advantage for Net mobile
By Steve Mullins. Brand benefit. Consumers don’t really understand the upsides of being able to access the web via their mobile phones – and the mobile industry is at fault for failing to educate the public.
“People are underwhelmed by mobile Internet,” says Alex Charlton, partner at Essential Research, which conducted a six-month study, Brandheld, on UK mobile habits. “It hasn’t been made clear from the outset what the benefits are. … The majority of campaigns have simply talked about the generic advantages. For example, a lot of the marketing talks about Facebook and other social media and e-mail. … Facebook will not drive this technology.”
One major problem has been marketers’ desire to liken mobile Internet to PC-based online services as a means of making the workings of on-the-go offerings clear.
Bad move, says Charlton.
“This product is inferior when compared to some aspects of online. That’s clearly not helpful. … You don’t create relative advantage for mobile Internet if you just talk about why it’s the same as online.”
So, what should the marketing narrative be?
“It’s about the unique benefits of mobile Internet – things such as time and location sensitivity,” Charlton says.
Essential found that ability to perform everyday activities such as checking real time travel updates (33% of respondents) and tracking in-store offers, coupons and vouchers (31%), were the most interesting to those who weren’t using mobile Internet.
But mobile Internet services really haven’t caught on at all. Around three quarters of mobile phone users don’t use their handsets to access the Web, Essential found, while 60% claim not to even own a mobile with Net access. Just 30% of these non-owners were interested in getting an Internet-enabled mobile phone
“There is an enormous gulf between the perceptions we hold about mobiles being a big part of our Internet lives and the reality. In fact only a small percentage of us are truly Web mobile users, and the industry has a big job to do to move mobile Internet into our everyday lives.”
But there’s opportunity here.
Essential respondents said well-known brands were the most appropriate organizations to provide mobile-Internet services, with 30% saying that they would like their favourite supermarket to provide grocery related offerings, and almost the same percentage claiming they were interested in their banks/building societies providing financial services on their handsets (see below).
“Everyday brands from the offline world can come in here and this will drive take-up,” says Charlton. “But this kind of thing isn’t even the Internet to most people… Marketers need to talk about the things people can do with mobile and then it becomes interesting.”
