Is Hong Kong ready to go "mobile?"

As Hong Kong approaches December 25, thoughts are starting to turn to Christmas and New Year, and there are several researches indicated that mobile plays an extremely important role in this coming festive season as there is a growing trend for shoppers to use their mobile device to help them make decisions while shopping. Mobile, we can’t live without “YOU”!

Have you ever forgotten to bring along your mobile phone? Feel like being naked whenever without it?

Smartphones have become part of our life and an extension of our body, there is no denying and we even can’t live and function well without them.

So many in fact, that it has been reported there will be more smartphones than humans on the planet in the near future, and the “Generation C” - always connected, communicating, content-centric, computerized, community-oriented, and non-stop clicking - is soon to constitute the largest single cohort of consumers worldwide, making paramount important impact to the society, but how do we prepare for the transformation of the consumer and business landscape? Are you ready?

Usage of mobile phones has exploded worldwide as it has become the primary communication tool for many people in their personal and professional lives. In Hong Kong, there were some 15.8 million subscribers to mobile-phone services in July 2012 (source : OFTA), the penetration rate of about 221.6% is among the highest in the world.

Among these 15.8 million subscribers, over 4.9 million were smartphone users. Each subscriber tends to own more than one mobile phone nowadays, and the number of such subscribers continues to increase.

The facts, therefore, indicate that the Hong Kong market is ready to embrace the new mobile technology, like NFC mobile payment services, and other value-added mobile services when they are available to users.

The advancement of mobile technology has taken the world to a critical point. Consumers are now demanding more information and interaction through multiple touch-points, which are available anytime and anywhere.

In order to meet customer demand and create market differentiation, more and more companies and brands have jumped on the bandwagon of smartphone advertising and marketing to capture new customers, they all want to adopt this platform to drive leads and traffic, and boost their ROI, as there are many benefits of mobile marketing - Some find it valuable for brand building and awareness promotion, some say that it is cost effectiveness, some claim that it is good to reach their targeted audience , and others say it is effective for building up a structured and valid database, but above all these, are they ready to exploit and capitalize on all the mobile marketing opportunity in their respective markets?

Nature of traditional marketing is that the whole marketing campaign is driven by the marketer with the main focus to sell the product or service. The marketer can choose what information to disseminate and when, where, how and to whom it is distributed.

He/ She is in complete and total control of the whole Marketing process in which customers are passive receivers, the whole communication is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant, and the most important of all, it is costly, whilst digital marketing or simply put it mobile marketing emphasizes high degree of customers’ involvement and engagement, and a two-way communication exchange.

Customers are active initiators and co-creators who are in the driving seats of the whole buying process. The buzzwords are : More accessible, flexible and responsive, timely and personal, and unlimited business opportunities.

Mobile marketing is highly interactive, measurable, personalized, and cost-effective as seen by many marketers and senior management.

Mobile is actually transforming consumer behaviours, and mobile commerce will definitely be the future trend. The local landscape shows that marketers now assign more of their budgets on mobile marketing, and this trend is expected to continue in the next few years.

As that translates, is the evidence clear that traditional marketing is experiencing a revolution or a challenge? And above all, the paradigm change is happening right before our very eyes.

Grabbing eyeballs is always the major responsibility of any marketer. The Nobel prize winner Herbert Alexander Simon（1916-2001）told us that “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”, that is “The Attention Economy”, as Michael H．Goldhaber, formerly a theoretical physicist, and is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, puts it.

He believes our economy is shifting to an attention economy, “If you have a lot of attention, in the terms of the new economy, you are wealthy”, and “The Attention Economy is the Eyeball Economy”.

There are many surveys show that consumers are spending more time accessing media through a mobile devise than they do with magazines and newspapers combined, using more time on their phones rather than any form of traditional marketing, and some 80% mobile users have paid attention to those mobile ads, other information and discounts shown on the phone, and the click rate continues to grow exponentially.

It is anticipated that in the next few years, mobile marketing will bring more relevant and personalized mode of marketing, the concept and value of the market is re-constructuring, and the new business economy and ecology is on the rise.

However, before tapping into this lucrative market, marketers have to build up an effective and a comprehensively structured database, and it is of no doubt that the investment may not be humble.

Philip Kotler, the world renowned marketing guru, has taught us that market segmentation is essential as buyers have unique needs and wants, and each is potentially a separate market, so that we can allocate limited resources more effectively under restricted constraints.

In the past, we will base on age, occupation, geographical locations, behavioral patterns, and other consumer preferences to segment our target audience, and now, the rule of game has changed in the Generation C. This segmentation either turns out to be more delicate or it becomes more blurred.

Take the example of Facebook. Facebook makes it easy and enjoyable for a loyal customer to advocate for the product / service he/she likes best on the social media platform of choice. When one customer identifies himself / herself on the facebook, his / her friends may immediately join in the discussion and comment, and the whole network may instantly know his/her experience with the product / service, generating some kind of ripple effect.

In such case, marketers have to be very aware of the mobility, openness and interactive attributes that smart phones and mobile marketing deliver, and should have insightful strategies and practical techniques in developing holistic mobile strategies that would engage customers with exhilarating mobile experiences. But mind you, a loyal supporter may not be necessarily a profitable customer.

However, the success and the effectiveness of mobile marketing depend much on the technology that will shape or significantly impact consumer behavior in the near future, while the iCloud, dropbox, icloud, skydrive, or similar kinds of sophisticated backend architecture and infrastructure, and different applications require coherent support from the government, mobile device manufacturers, system and application developers, mobile network operators, cloud services providers, and information security professionals to come up with reliable security strategy.

Best yet, adapting isn’t always easy, especially when considering the complexity of the mobile environment, which requires optimizing the experience across multiple platforms and for both mobile websites and apps? Then come to another issue about technology awareness? Do marketers have good understanding in mobile technologies and understand how to leverage mobile platforms?

Mobile Marketing requires 4Cs, that is Commerce; Creativity; Content, and Community, or the 5Ps as some experts suggest, the adoption of Permission ; Preference ; Personalization ; Promotion and Proximity, but above all, the most important buzzword is the “User Experience”.

However, those rules and principles, instead of imposing threats to traditional marketing, do supplement to traditional marketing, adding more invaluable insights to its golden rule of 4Ps, Product; Promotion; Price and Place, and create opportunities for the integration.

To maximize digital, creative and mobile platforms “strategically” to draw more “eyeballs” and “revenue” in order to optimize and maximize available resources and opportunities.

Many Companies and brands are bullish on mobile marketing benefits, and are aware of the advantages of mobile, but do they have adequate skill set to get down to it and create and sustain maximum customers engagement, to increase sales and lead generation and build brand equity?

When we encounter 100,000 customers with 100,000 requests and 100,000 personalized experiences, can we still entertain them under limited resources? Do marketers understand fully the changing needs of mobile users today, and know how to translate that mobile opportunity into value?

Do marketers learn how to integrate mobile with their existing marketing mix and “humanise” their digital experience to deliver relevancy, immediacy and proximity to their customers in order to translate it into profits? Is it easy to calculate the return on investment (ROI)? Have they maximized the mobile efforts and used it to its full potential to reap returns?

Nevertheless, mobile marketing is a perfect extension of traditional marketing, and best practice of today’s marketers is always a combination of “traditional marketing” and new media marketing.

The new power in the digital world is coming in a great speed and this pronounced shift in consumer behavior is simply too large for companies and brands to ignore, with the future of their business depending on how well they adapt to the new environment, and how best they position to capitalize on these shifting market dynamics to engage consumers in a 360-degree, Fun, Creative, Interactive, Social, Simple and Fast will be the magic words that contribute to the success of mobile marketing which is more of an art than a science.