Every first-year business student, aspiring entrepreneur and average consumer knows that competition in an open marketplace is a core value of capitalism and supports a free economy.

But in emerging new industries such as mobile marketing, upstart providers offering bargain-basement prices and substandard service can hurt not only our individual businesses, but our entire industry.

Mobile marketing, with its technological sophistication and as-yet-unimagined applications, is still misunderstood by most of the advertising world.

Those of us out there in the trenches every day trying to convince advertisers of the benefits of a mobile marketing campaign know how important these two key elements are:

-Educating our clients about how and why mobile marketing works
-Providing expert client service and support

Yet while we are focused on creating increased awareness for potential clients and a positive experience for existing clients, new mobile marketing companies are springing up, offering deeply discounted pricing and bare-bones services.

In a brand new industry such as ours, this creates a negative impression for advertisers who are just beginning to explore the unknown territory of mobile marketing.

As a result, the offerings of established, full-service companies become devalued because advertisers begin to see it as a cheap product.

Fool service
Here is how this scenario might play out.

Let us say the XX Company wants to drive sales for a specific retail product, such as laundry soap, by offering a coupon via mobile marketing. It is seduced by the low prices promoted by mobile marketers offering a bulk package of messages for pennies per message sent, and no additional fees. What is wrong with this picture?

The lack of a solid marketing plan for starters.

Typically XX Company would get an allotment of messages without an effective plan or way to use them. Is there an accessible, knowledgeable expert advising XX Company about how to realize the most benefit from this campaign? Who is explaining the dos and don’ts of text messaging for marketing?

Some of these unsupported campaigns make glaring mistakes, such as leaving out the company name to indicate who is sending the message or asking the consumer to go online when the goal is to drive store foot traffic.

These campaigns might even ask consumers to text a keyword to a word (PIZZA) as opposed to the numeric short code (74992). These are simple errors that most of us in the industry can recite in our sleep, and they are easily addressed by a company that knows the business.

Many of these low-priced packages supply the platform without the services of a skilled manager who can study the product, the audience, the budget and other factors to provide assistance and guidance in order to create an effective campaign.

So XX Company tries to manage the campaign in-house with no education or support. Once the company realizes that the campaign failed, it is lost to mobile marketing forever, firmly believing that mobile marketing is ineffective.

This is how perfectly good advertisers end up getting burned and giving mobile marketing a bad rap.

To be fair, there is another possible scenario that does not involve substandard services, but produces the same result for the industry.

In this situation, a viable mobile marketing company offers full-service programs for an extremely low price just to establish itself as a market leader.

The company works to get as many major brands on board as possible, by severely under-pricing pricing the technology and service. At the end of the year it will either raise its prices – I know of one company that did this and slapped existing clients with a tenfold increase – or it will sell their now-valuable company to the highest bidder.

It is a great business strategy for generating case studies and building a company’s client portfolio, but it compromises the ethics of our entire industry.

These strategies are natural processes in the business world, and competition is expected and healthy.

Depreciation appreciation
We know that technology products are destined to become cheaper and most widely distributed over time, but usually this happens later in the evolution of a product or a technology.

Mobile marketing is still in its early phase, so to introducing this kind of cost- and quality- cutting so early in the game does not bode well for what the industry will look like in five years.

More importantly, it is devaluing the technology and service of mobile marketing.

As a media buyer in my previous life, I recommended and bought traditional media such as print, radio and television as well as online digital buys on behalf of clients.

I have never come across a media channel that delivers an immediate, one-to-one ad that is trackable and viral, and bottom line, generates one of the highest returns and drives immediate foot traffic to the point of sale. When used correctly, this type of media is extremely valuable and should be priced accordingly.

In a perfect world, all our companies would come together to create pricing standards and educational guidelines for brands and advertisers.

The Mobile Marketing Association is making strong efforts to accomplish content guidelines. But unethical competition has the potential to thwart our industry before it even gets off the ground.

So I would like to suggest that mobile marketers find a way to work together as a unified group – perhaps via the MMA – to establish parameters that define and secure the value of mobile marketing. It is not an issue that only affects our individual companies. It affects our entire industry and, now, while we are still in the early stages, is the best time to act.