Mobile Commerce Minute

With ComScore going public with Christmas bumping this quarter's mobile spending up to $10B, Chuck surfaces some timely research on consumer spending patterns for the coming season. This research includes how much are consumers going to spend from their phones and what they are doing with their phones while in and out of the store. 

Shopkick has been a pioneer in the mobile rewards world since it's launch 3.5 years ago. Chuck Martin recently had a chat with their CEO, Cyriac Roeding, about the company and the trends they are seeing in this new mobile/retail/rewards/loyalty world.

 

Listen up folks, unfortunately the battle to attract customers into your retail location is only the start of the purchase cycle. Customers are becoming more and more diligent as to where and when they spend their money because of the connected devices they all carry. Just because you get them in the store doesn't mean they will actually buy from you. All is not lost as you will see in this episode - the opportunities to create life-long customers are right in front of you, you just need to use the technology they do. Watch and learn.

There must have been a visionary that coined the phrase "bricks and mortar" if you consider the shrapnel the retail industry has absorbed since the web - and now mobile - processed its first transaction. If in-store experience is one of the key differentiators between the impersonal convenience of screen buying and creating a life-long committed customer, the focus has to be on getting consumers into the store. But how? Perhaps this is the answer...for now.

The mobile app world has been traditionally divided into apps that we play with, apps that we use for work, apps that we use to socialize with and totalitarian apps that serve a single function or purpose - banking apps fall into this category. As time has passed, we have seen the blending of many of these into commerce-enabled or transaction enabled or marketing enabled apps - you have to make a buck right? 

 

Well, now the banks are looking at this industry with wide eyes as US Bank and Monitise try to close the gap between the money in our accounts and the product we want to buy. Is this too much control by too few or the natural evolution of banking? You decide.

 

June 29, 2007 is the date credited with the acceleration of the mobile movement but that date may also have started in motion the beginning of the end of the price tag as well. You see, that was the date the first iPhone was launched and since then, mobile has completely altered the way we purchase product - and the way we look at the price of products. It started with showrooming and has migrated to price matching - the power has definitely shifted to the consumer and here's a perfect example of that in action.

How important is owning the mobile customer? Well, if you take a look at the list of brands that are starting to accept mobile payments within their apps you will get the point. Subway is the latest brand to roll this out inside their app but they didn't build it. More and more companies are relying on white label services to get this part of their business onto devices and into their customers hands.

There is no doubt that mobile commerce has permeated the four corners of the earth. In line with the distribution of devices, payments from and to mobile devices have been increasing at an incredible rate right across the globe. A recent study shows this growth and the impact. Watch this.

The mantra for retail has always been "Location! Location! Location!" but that is changing. Today, thanks to the mobile device we all carry, location and context contributes to the relevance of shopping. Pay close attention to this as it is no longer about being on a busy intersection it is about being at the intersection of time, place and need.

The long-awaited and oft-predicted death of SMS will have to wait I guess. It seems that as we all get hammered with message after message after message in email and through the social networks that the one thing that we can control is who we wish to receive SMS offers from. Only the elite of the elite get to send us text messages about their brand and it is something that many retailers are not even thinking about at this moment. Think about this: As the noise gets louder and louder and you need to discount more and more to entice customers to your business, SMS may be the one true direct conversation starter that remains uncluttered because it is in the hands of the consumer. The problem is that you need to show value above and beyond to keep people interested. You have been challenged.