CRM

Mobiles, Texting, Multimedia Messaging and Marketing

It still surprises me how poorly and rarely text messaging is used in marketing. Although there have been some stunning successes (Cadbury's promotions, Daily Mail competitions), in general market development has been weak. I discovered why in conversations with my friends at mobile companies. They all use texting intensively as a medium to manage their customers, and regard their understanding of what works and what doesn't work as commercially confidential.

Contrast this with the situation in the 1980s, when the recently privatised British Telecom invested massive sums - profitably - in market-broadening activities, particularly in developing the market for business to consumer telephony. Of course, BT was then a monopoly. Mercury, cable, mobiles were on the horizon, but British Telecom had a few heady years educating businesses in how to talk to consumers in how to take up the services. Are you old enough to remember the Maureen Lipman "Beattie" commercial in which she was told that she couldn't put 0800 in front of any number to call free? So she ended up calling a manufacturer of some arcane business-to-business product just to experience the pleasure of a free call. And it worked. The more BT spent on market education, and of course in making it easier for businesses and consumers to talk to each other, the more money BT made.

Today, it's very different. We have four big mobile suppliers in a tough battle to retain their best customers and to recruit the best new customers. The market is relatively mature - most people have mobile phones (I have two!) and most use their mobile much more frequently than their landline. Indeed, many younger customers do not bother with a landline. The suppliers are much less concerned with market broadening, and more with market share. However, on the other side of the fence are a large number of big consumer marketing companies who are having to experiment their way towards an understanding of how to use the mobile. They come from many sectors - retailers, FMCG manufacturers, and services suppliers of all kinds - from finance to travel and leisure. In the middle sit the mass media - press, TV and radio, who should be playing a central role in changing the way the whole system works, but because of the lack of initiative from mobile suppliers are just using texting to their own ends, particularly in revenue raising competitions.

All this strikes me as a bit odd. Our research at IBM (and that of our many software partners who supply different components of CRM systems) shows that when you finally get your data act together and indulge in a relevant, timely conversation with consumers, response and sales rates rocket. Texting fits the bill - or can do if well managed. As the research commissioned from IMC by Enpocket has shown (yes, I know they have a vested interest), texting produces high awareness and recall of message, positive effects for the brand. It benefits from lack of clutter, newness or freshness of the medium (for the time being), ease of response via texting itself but also for other channels e.g. visit website or store. The cost per response is normally at least as good as the best alternative medium and often substantially less.

However, texting is a very personal medium. It is a strange mixture of mail, telephone, e-mail and (with multimedia messaging) the Web. Because people tend to have a very personal view of how they want to use their mobile, it needs to be permissioned very differently from other media. Back in the 1980's, BT was THE authority and sole provider of telephony, and consumers had much more respect for such companies. Today, the decline of respect is a well-established phenomenon. Consumers must be given very cogent reasons for allowing big companies to talk to them via the mobile. My view is that we need to reconsider permissioning for the mobile in creative ways. Because our systems and processes (at least in well-managed operations) can now support it, we should be considering requesting permissions for very specific purposes e.g. for a particular brand to send a message in a particular time slot and only if the customer is in a particular areas e.g. Saturday afternoon shopping at Bluewater or the Trafford or Metro Centres. This permission might be given one or two days before either because the consumer gets a message from their mobile company or because of a request for permission in national media ("let us tell you what's on offer when you're shopping this Saturday). The earlier BT experience showed that to change the way consumers thought and acted, you needed to work intensively above and below the line.

Because I'm intrigued by how a new medium is adopted and by the role played by the providers of this and other media and by innovative users, I'm putting together a virtual and real forum in which to explore, between media, mobile companies and product and service suppliers, how the use of messaging can be accelerated to benefit all parties, especially consumers. I'd be very interested to hear your views about this, including strategies, techniques, benefits and risks - whether to reputation, privacy or pocket. To contribute please contact me at merlin_stone@uk.ibm.com

About the Author
Merlin Stone is IBM Professor of Business Transformation at Surrey University, IBM's Business Research Leader and Director of QCi Ltd and the Database Group Ltd.