Bluecasting not so blue after all

There has been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of Bluetooth (aka “toothing“) as a mobile marketing technique. As a technology, it undoubtedly holds promise–the key is in implementation. What a company might call “bluecasting,” the consumer may consider “bluespamming.” In a recent trial we did in Singapore with Aviva, we hoped to uncover some best practices.

Aviva’s Futurator Campaign

Through a dedicated Bluetooth kiosk, users could receive a banner encouraging them to experience Aviva’s Futurator in the actual shopping mall, and a chance to win $10,000. For people to receive the banner, they had to be in the range of the kiosk and activate the bluetooth on their mobile phone. The results were more than encouraging as we achieved over 4% banner ad download rates over 3 days reaching out to more than 790 unique mobile phones.

Right Message At the Right Time

At the beginning, questions were raised about the number of people who would actually turn on their Bluetooth without any pre-seeded knowledge of the campaign. Often, with Bluecasting campaigns, a lot of emphasis is placed on awareness marketing, essentially telling costumers and consumers to ‘Turn on your Bluetooth’. While awareness marketing has its advantage and is a big part of successful proximity-based campaigns, we also learned that the location of whatever is being distributed is an understated and overlooked ingredient in any successful Bluecasting campaign. Where your customer is actually located when the message arrives is a major factor in influencing their behavior. This makes sense on many levels, from immediate customer engagement to shortening the decision process, getting the right message at the right time is essential. The old cliche ‘quality not just quantity’ was on every one’s lips when we were doing our post campaign analysis.

Setting up Shop

Another insight from the campaign came when we discovered that by setting up various Bluecasting stations inside and outside our mall location, the highest participation rate was found outside the mall. This reaffirmed two of our understandings of mobile behavior and usage:

1) Information that is fed at an early stage of the shopping decision making cycle is crucial to influencing decisions on where to go and what to do

2) Engaging the user in a somewhat neutral environment is better than engaging him/her in an environment in which advertising and buying is expected

Setting up shop at a very visible, prominent location also helped create buzz. Not only was the audience intrigued but they opted-in as well. We saw many customers pause to receive the file and then look around for some marketing presence, seeing our tent outside got them to duly walk over to sign up. This movement and engagement sparked others to follow the herd.
Conclusion

We were pleased with the results and continue to advocate bluecasting as a great mobile marketing tool when relevant. By understanding consumer expectations and reactions to activity on their personal device, we have begun to see more and more how understanding mobile behavior is so important in delivering great mobile campaigns.

Song of the post "Candy" by Paolo Nutini

Nokia's mobile campaign "comes with branding"

For all who don’t know, Singapore is one of only 3 countries in the world where NOKIA has rolled out its “comes with music” service. All new owners of a NOKIA “comes with music” phone get unlimited access to millions of songs online from the NOKIA music store. Singapore as a market has over 3 million downloads in 2 months since its launch and whilst NOKIA has yet to release information on its sales figures, this is an incredible model of exploiting mobile usage behavior through relevant content.

A year ago when NOKIA first announced this exclusive and global first initiative, many observers were wondering why NOKIA would want to invest in what they considered a marketing gimmick. How would free music relate back to brand equity and sales? Was the cost of providing the free music carrot an acceptable one to bear? Recently, digital east Asia reported this quote

“The love affair between music and young urban Asian consumers remains inseparable and it’s no surprise that music continues to be an important part of their daily lives. Our overall findings showed that 25% were listening to music more in the last 12 months.
Ideally, the music industry should be working with telecommunications companies to deliver music via mobile phone while marketers and brand owners should be exploring or realigning their strategies by incorporating music as a platform to reach this fast-growing and digitally driven segment.”
– Steve Garton, Executive Director - Media, Synovate.

What NOKIA has now in Singapore at least is a market leading reach in consumers who actively enjoy music from NOKIA’s branded portal. This incentive will continue to ensure traits such as brand loyalty and WOM evangelism are alive and kicking with their core audience. Also, the fact that these songs are non convertible and only playable on NOKIA phone sets, NOKIA has also managed to offer more compelling reason for their consumers to throw away their old mp3 player and replace it with a NOKIA music enabled mobile phone.

I/We at MobileBehavior often talk about opportunities brands should take advantage of within the mobile phone environment. By offering value and content, brands can now be a part of a mobile user’s individual experience through their personal phone. From the Iphone/Blackberry applications to bookmarked WAP sites to Java games, the opportunities are endless and waiting to be explored. NOKIA’s “comes with music” mobile strategy also comes with branding, how about yours?

Song of the blog

The White Tie Affair "Candle Sick & Tired"

How to market mobile.... here

We just recently concluded a very enjoyable speaking engagement in Hong Kong and met with some of the brightest and creative minds in the industry. There was an amazing opportunity for MobileBehavior to interact and drill deeper into the minds of leading marketers in Asia. From brand managers to CEOs, our 1:1 conversations confirmed what we were evangelizing, that marketers now understand the importance of mobile. The question however has become “How”?

This is a powerful question that shows us 2 major insights. Firstly, We are no longer stuck in the “why?”. Having to convince a marketer about the relevance of mobile marketing seems to be a thing of the past. Almost every attendee we spoke to had a Smartphone in hand, checking emails, opening attachments, surfing WAP links, accessing news. This made them a part of their own mobile marketing audience even if they hadn’t realized it yet! For some time, there was always a disconnect between mobile marketer and audience as the marketer never considered him/herself part of that mix. Now, we have come to an age where we get it because we live it.

The next important insight from the question of “how?” brought home some major reality checks. Marketers in Asia recognize the possibilities based on mobile penetration rates, excellent carrier infrastructure and user behavior. We have in Asia, a mobile only audience in certain countries such as Philippines and Indonesia. China and India represent 2 markets with unparallel potential based on existing mobile services such as Mobile Social networking sites and direct carrier services. However, the peculiarities and nuances of each market has bred a lot of confusion on exactly how mobile marketing works in these parts of the world. It is clear that there is no one mobile strategy that can fit into Indonesia and be duplicated in India The question therefore isn’t just how to market mobile? It’s how do I market mobile here?

What resonated well with our peers lay in the area of activation. The mobile phone has an opportunity to breathe life into any campaign from an engagement vantage point. Using SMS and IVR channels to lead consumers from a passive to active role makes a lot of sense for any marketer in any market. Similarly, there are many other channels where the mobile phone is able to act as an enabler for marketers to interact, track and measure on their offline media. This is an important part of our approach in providing as many answers as we can to our clients and partners. From identifying common marketing tools ( think SMS , IVR) to taking advantage of local networks (e.g. island wide Wi-Fi, 3.5G networks) to considerations like dominant mobile handset brand data, we have discovered most marketers don’t know where to start and how to get mobile campaigns off the ground.

We were pleased to know Asia as a mobile market isn’t being debated. The questions of how to get involved in these fertile areas are excellent from a progress point of view. We often hear marketers talk about paradigm shifts in thinking. Today we are seeing a whole new movement of behavior in the realm of mobile. As innovation and technology continue to converge in providing us awesome mobile services and products. We think mobile marketing is NOW the next great thing in Asia.


Song of the blog
Live version of "Above the bones" by Mishka

Think mass mobile, think Asia

I just attended a conference on Saturday and Scott Rafer spoke on “Market Opportunity, Not Magic.” (His slides are available on slideshare here.) His main takeaway was that “size matters,” meaning that the market size in which you want to succeed needs to have enough numbers to give anyone a sustainable revenue per head. It convinced us more and more that in Asia the mobile market represents more than just blue oceans, it is the blue ocean. Asia makes up 40 percent of the global mobile market which is 21 percent more than Latin and North America combined, yet the ad spend in this region is so minuscule, it’s hard to even find the numbers.

China alone possesses 618 million mobile handsets which, as a single market, is a staggering number. Compare that to India, where about 500 million users are expected by 2012. We know the mass and the market are here, so what’s stopping mobile from taking off in a big way? Instead of posting yet another 10 reasons why we aren’t nearly there yet, let’s look at some good initiatives happening in and around Asia to get a feel for where we’re going. We’ll be spreading these over the next couple of weeks in what we hope will be an enlightening series of case studies.

Today’s spotlight is on Vietnamese mobile operator Viettel Telecom who announced a SIM card that is targeted directly at tourists in Vietnam. The aim of this service is to provide tourists with all the information they need during their time in the country. From hotel to transportation to weather news, all of these useful facts are available via the prepaid SIM card’s services.

Utility SIM cards that come pre-packed or linked with services is a great idea. In many developing nations within Asia, prepaid SIM cards outnumber postpaid SIM cards and so utility SIM cards make a lot of sense. Imagine the usefulness of pre-packed data such as applications or pre-saved RSS/mobile internet links easily. Taking this idea to countries dependent on prepaid SIM cards such as Philippines and Indonesia, we can start thinking about native branded utilities that give real meaning to the long tail.

When it comes to issues such as fragmentation and adoption of service, mass can be a double-edged sword. But as we make great strides in technology and user behavior, the only certainty is that the numbers will continue to swell and push the mobile agenda deeper into marketing proposals. It’s not just mobile as a medium that marketers need to consider, it’s also mobile as a mass.

Song of the blog

"Break me out" by the Rescues

QR codes. Relevant?

Having just come back from a mobile marketing forum where the focus was on visual code technology or QR codes, there was a lot running through my mind on the subject. Is there a place for QR codes in mobile marketing especially here in South East Asia, where not only is there a disconnect in software but also, a huge gulf in visual code services?

Unlike Japan, where the technology is native to the camera, users here in Asia require separate code readers for different codes. This lack of singularity makes QR code marketing seem troublesome and complicated.  Besides the obvious answers like embedding the technology in handsets and unifying readers, there are other less obvious ways QR codes in my opinion can still be a powerful mobile marketing weapon.

Remembering that QR codes evolved from shipping product barcode scanning, why not return to its origins? I would love to see additional information I could scan on products sold in supermarkets or Hyper marts. From nutritional information to price to even recipes, these QR codes could be a source of value to say diabetics who want to know if certain products are sugar free. It would make sense for the supermarket to develop its own in house reader since it would stocks all these products on their aisles and present these information as their VAS.

How about Libraries? Scanning a QR code unavailable book covers would tell you when the book was going to be available, allow you to reserve via WAP access. How about Concert tickets? I would love to read more about an artiste and access a content portal to listen to songs or download lyrics whilst waiting for the opening act to start. The mobile phone has replaced the lighter in many gigs and I think singing along from your screen could be the next big thing.

So even though we may not have the same ease of access as our sushi loving neighbors from across the ocean, QR codes are useful as long as it presents a real time value to our consumers. The issue of singular readers will undoubtedly affect nationwide adoption but if your business is in it for the long term; and you see QR codes as a long term investment to bring mobility solutions to your customers, then surely the answer to the topic question is : YES.

Song of the blog
Sometime around midnight by the airborne toxic event
Sometime Around Midnight