Simplicissimus

Wireless World, Singapore/Kuala Lumpur, October 2004 issue

The best thing to send me into a foul mood is to get a marketing guru talking about mobile marketing as a ‘disruptive technology’. It’s stupid, annoying, and all too often heard in mobile marketing circles.

The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School guru, to describe a new, lower performance, but less expensive product or service that eventually displaces existing ones by gradually moving upwards on the performance scale. Think Johan Gutenberg inventing the printing press at a time when thousands of monks are painstakingly copying manuscripts. Fairly recent examples are digital cameras and, probably, music downloads.

Why would mobile marketing be disruptive? The line of thinking is that it’s cheap, gradually enhancing its performance as we move up the network generation ladder, and that it eventually will displace existing types of marketing. As potential victims Direct Mail and email often get mentioned.

That’s wrong on all counts. Mobile marketing is only cheap for those who see mobile phones as spammable objects; its performance as a medium is only partially linked to transfer speeds on a mobile network; and finally, like all other new media it cannot be compared with older ones, let alone that it will displace them. Neither TV nor radio commercials ever replaced print ads, the Internet never replaced print, email never replaced Direct Mail. Every new medium in marketing history found its new place next to the old ones.

So why do I get so worked up about it? Because this misconception leads to bad and often even annoying marketing practices. And the most frequent mistake is complexity.

Consumers like simplicity. If you want trigger them into action, make the desired action a simple one. Don’t try to drag them over to a website where they have to fill in a complicated form; don’t have them key in long strings of numbers or hard-to-remember codes in text messages; and don’t EVER try to trick them into sending you a message for the sole purpose of using their number for a sales promotion later on.

Especially the latter gives mobile marketing potentially a bad rep: people are extremely privacy-sensitive where their handphones are concerned. Abusing their confidence can turn them against

SMS marketing, like SMS itself, should be clear and simple. Key in a message, as short as possible, dial a number and send it. Even if it’s all of 160 characters and the subject is piranhas, the next girl can do it in 46.33 seconds as a recent record shows.

Simplicity and high effectiveness can go together. Want proof? Here’s a recent example. During a hot spell in Beijing, Coca-Cola let consumers guess the next day’s high temperature. To participate, they simply had to key in COKE and send this to a 4-digit phone number. The prize was a year’s supply of Coke. The promotion yielded millions of consumer interactions and reinforced Coca-Cola’s image as a thirst-quencher.

This doesn’t mean that you should avoid high-tech applications – as long as they do their work silently and effortlessly, there’s no problem at all. Recently I wrote about the great potential of using handphones’ built-in cameras to connect phones to ads and billboards. High tech, but of the point-and-click type. Are you interested? Point here. Thank you – here’s your info, your offer, whatever. Using technology doesn’t need to be complicated.

Developments in mobile marketing are often driven by technology. Colour screens, smartphones, 3G, WiFi, the list is endless. And it's not only poor consumers like you and me who are baffled by all these new gadgets and tricks. Apparently, it's the marketers too. My advice: don’t get distracted by snazzy technology. Use it. Put simply: don’t drool, stay cool.