Killer App
Wireless World, Singapore/Kuala Lumpur, July 2004 issue
Every once in a while there’s an invention that changes people’s lives. In today’s Information Society, where everything hinges on finding the right application for all the technology that’s lying around, such a thing is known as the Killer App.
Well known Killer Apps are email and web surfing. They have changed the nature of the World Wide Web, indeed of people’s behaviour, and made the Internet into what it is today. They truly conquered the world.
But Killer Apps do not only roam cyberspace. They influence mobile phone use too. Take for instance SMS. Invented in 1992, SMS was an accidental success that caught nearly everyone in the mobile industry by surprise. It wasn’t even meant to be used by consumers. It wasn’t promoted either, for that very reason. But consumers didn’t need promotion. By 1999 they found out text messaging was there, and they embraced it. Now life without has become unthinkable.
So what will be the next Killer App? That’s the $64,000 question, as they say. Those who guess the answer and start to act on it before anyone else does, have a pretty fair chance of becoming quite rich.
Well, I’m about to make your Wireless World subscription pay itself back many times over. Because I dare predict the next Killer App in mobile marketing, and I’m going to share it with the lucky readers of this column.
Take a look at today’s new phones. What do you see? They’re almost all being equipped with nice little colour screens, and digital cameras. The latter are nice to have, but not spectacularly so. After all, a camera in a phone is a compromise. But OK, it works.
The colour screens are actually a bit silly. They look nice but lack practicality. Wallpaper here, picture of a loved one there, and that’s as far as it goes on the stamp-sized area. Network operators keep promoting it for mobile browsing or doing email. In vain, because it ain’t fun to do that without a proper keyboard, and since we want our phones to be small and nifty little things, a keyboard is out of the question.
But what if you saw something that raised your interest or prompted you to buy, and you wouldn’t have to do anything except pointing your phone? Point the camera at the ad, poster or brochure and hey presto! The information’s there, nicely tailored to your phone’s screen.
This is made possible by software that uses web browsers now standard in most camera phones, by making the phone act like a bar code reader. People can look up information without the fiddly business of having to type in a URL on a tiny keypad.
There are infinitely many uses. For example, you could scan a code posted on a bus stop to quickly look up a web page with realtime information showing when the next bus is due. Concert-goers can make on-the-spot decisions to buy tickets off posters sporting the codes, making the poster a direct sales link between the poster producer and the ticket seller. Retailers can advertise in-store promotions, pointing bargain seekers to the nearest outlet.
The most powerful tool in sales promotion is the call-to-action at exactly the right moment in time. It’s the magic AIDA formula in its ideal form: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. People don’t go anywhere anymore without their phones. So now you can radically cut the time between Attention and Action. Any place, any time you want.
Mobile marketers who catch on to this trend will find it has enormous potential. And I hope they’ll remember the poor columnist who put them on to it.
Every once in a while there’s an invention that changes people’s lives. In today’s Information Society, where everything hinges on finding the right application for all the technology that’s lying around, such a thing is known as the Killer App.
Well known Killer Apps are email and web surfing. They have changed the nature of the World Wide Web, indeed of people’s behaviour, and made the Internet into what it is today. They truly conquered the world.
But Killer Apps do not only roam cyberspace. They influence mobile phone use too. Take for instance SMS. Invented in 1992, SMS was an accidental success that caught nearly everyone in the mobile industry by surprise. It wasn’t even meant to be used by consumers. It wasn’t promoted either, for that very reason. But consumers didn’t need promotion. By 1999 they found out text messaging was there, and they embraced it. Now life without has become unthinkable.
So what will be the next Killer App? That’s the $64,000 question, as they say. Those who guess the answer and start to act on it before anyone else does, have a pretty fair chance of becoming quite rich.
Well, I’m about to make your Wireless World subscription pay itself back many times over. Because I dare predict the next Killer App in mobile marketing, and I’m going to share it with the lucky readers of this column.
Take a look at today’s new phones. What do you see? They’re almost all being equipped with nice little colour screens, and digital cameras. The latter are nice to have, but not spectacularly so. After all, a camera in a phone is a compromise. But OK, it works.
The colour screens are actually a bit silly. They look nice but lack practicality. Wallpaper here, picture of a loved one there, and that’s as far as it goes on the stamp-sized area. Network operators keep promoting it for mobile browsing or doing email. In vain, because it ain’t fun to do that without a proper keyboard, and since we want our phones to be small and nifty little things, a keyboard is out of the question.
But what if you saw something that raised your interest or prompted you to buy, and you wouldn’t have to do anything except pointing your phone? Point the camera at the ad, poster or brochure and hey presto! The information’s there, nicely tailored to your phone’s screen.
This is made possible by software that uses web browsers now standard in most camera phones, by making the phone act like a bar code reader. People can look up information without the fiddly business of having to type in a URL on a tiny keypad.
There are infinitely many uses. For example, you could scan a code posted on a bus stop to quickly look up a web page with realtime information showing when the next bus is due. Concert-goers can make on-the-spot decisions to buy tickets off posters sporting the codes, making the poster a direct sales link between the poster producer and the ticket seller. Retailers can advertise in-store promotions, pointing bargain seekers to the nearest outlet.
The most powerful tool in sales promotion is the call-to-action at exactly the right moment in time. It’s the magic AIDA formula in its ideal form: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. People don’t go anywhere anymore without their phones. So now you can radically cut the time between Attention and Action. Any place, any time you want.
Mobile marketers who catch on to this trend will find it has enormous potential. And I hope they’ll remember the poor columnist who put them on to it.
posted by Jos. at Thursday, July 01, 2004
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