Which Mobile Marketer Are You? Scoping the Showdown Between the Cool Kids and the Pragmatists
Written on September 21st 2006, published on www.adotas.com
By Brian Hecht 
Used with permission from ADOTAS, Copyright 2006. All rights reserved
Submitted to the MMA by Kikucall

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Last week, thousands of businesspeople gathered at the CTIA convention in Los Angeles, the semi-annual show where companies unveil the latest and greatest mobile products and services. I was among those wandering the show floor in a state of over-stimulation that is the hallmark effect of a good tradeshow. CTIA is catering to a sector that is having its “golden moment.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital have flooded into mobile, yielding a bumper crop of offerings that are just now beginning to compete in the marketplace. The moment is golden because few of these offerings have had the chance to disappoint or fail, so everyone’s outlook is rosy, everyone’s projections a hockeystick. When Tony Hawk launches a new mobile game by giving an extreme skateboarding performance on an enormous half-pipe built in the middle of the Los Angeles Convention Center, that’s when you know a market is overripe.

I visited the show not as a mobile enthusiast, but as a marketer, trying to understand exactly how all of this innovation could help us grow our brands and reach our marketing goals. It is not an easy puzzle to piece together. This proliferation of mobile service companies has brought an onslaught of services that sound neat but are difficult to decipher.

For example, I encountered no fewer than four companies that have competing technologies that allow consumers to upload photos or video from their mobile phone to a blog, a Website, or any other virtual destination. Sounds neat, very Web 2.0. There was another phalanx of companies that allow any owner of a Website to host a “mobile storefront,” selling a selection of ringtones, wallpaper, and mobile phone software for revenue that eventually gets split with the technology provider and the wireless carriers . Also pretty neat.

It’s exciting to glimpse into the world of gee-whiz innovation, but how much of this can we put to work for us as marketers right now?, My experience in building dozens of mobile promotions for major brands has taught me there is a what I call a “Gee Whiz Gap” – the gap between what technology can do and what marketers can use. My most recent visit to CTIA brought this into clear view. We marketers must be aware of the Gap if we are to successfully navigate the shoals of mobile marketing. The goal is not to be a skeptic, but rather to be selective and brutally realistic about which mobile offerings can help us reach the measurable results our brands and clients demand.

So how do you know which mobile strategy to deploy? Of course, it depends on your marketing goals. The first question to ask yourself is: What type of marketing are you trying to do? There are two types of marketers when it comes to mobile. Type A, let’s call them the “Cool Kids” want to use mobile to align their brand with cutting-edge technology and youth trends. They are less interested in how many people actually use the technology or in concrete metrics like response rates or sales lift.

For the Cool Kids, the ultimate win is an awesome press clip or a mention on MTV. As a mobile agency serving marketers, my company loves working with the Cool Kids. Who wouldn’t? Budgets are fat, the ideas are super creative, and the clients are energized. The Cool Kids don’t care about the Gee Whiz Gap. Like Tony Hawk, they’ll race right to the precipice and never look down.

Then there’s Type B, the Pragmatists. For Pragmatists, mobile marketing is a means to a concrete, measurable goal. Often, mobile will be an experimental part of a media mix that is firmly grounded in a traditional interactive media buy. The Pragmatist has entered mobile not because it is cool, but because it has the potential to achieve certain marketing goals that other media miss. The Pragmatist is likely to have a limited budget and a low tolerance for risk. Results will be scrutinized and mobile’s contribution will be compared to the contribution of other channels. It is hard to make a mobile program work for the Pragmatist, but it is often worth the effort, because success is built on a solid foundation of measurable results.

Which kind of marketer are you? There’s a mobile niche for each type, and determining your niche depends on where you stand in relation to the Gee Whiz Gap. The cold hard truth is that despite the coolness factor and the CTIA hype, relatively few Americans have the types of phones that allow them to accomplish advanced mobile tasks like downloading complicated applications and viewing mobile video. Of those that have phones with these capabilities, the percentages of consumers who actually use those functions is even smaller.

The numbers are increasing, but if you are looking for mass reach, you will find yourself in the Pragmatist camp, and will want to stay away from advanced mobile applications that require downloads or videos. Simple text messaging remains the single best tool of the Pragmatist marketer. There is a wide variety of very cool promotional tactics open to you using simple text messaging, including alerts, voting, and interactive quizzes. And enough Americans now have and use text messaging that, as a Pragmatist, you have a good shot at getting the reach and results you crave.

And if you are, in fact, a Cool Kid, the Gee Whiz Gap is your friend. There has never been a better time to experiment with cutting-edge technology. The wave of innovation unleashed by the boom in mobile will work to your advantage. Technology companies will compete for your business, and they will engage in a virtual dance-off to demonstrate that their wares are the coolest. The Cool Kids may still use text messaging as the core of a mobile promotion, but they may just as easily create “mobisodes,” short video clips optimized for viewing on a mobile phone.

The real marketing dream, however, is the rare effort that manages to straddle the worlds of the Cool Kids and the Pragmatists. If you are really ambitious, this is how to shoot the mobile moon: Starting on the Pragmatist side, select a mobile technology that is just far out enough that it would also capture the imagination of the Cool Kids. If you find the right balance, then your promotion will hit the sweet spot on the consumer’s adoption curve, just like Apple did when it launched the Ipod. Such successes may come only once a generation, but if it happens anywhere, it could well happen out on the mobile frontier. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />