Carriers are key to mobile marketing

January 21, 2010

Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri is senior business analyst at Infosys Technologies

By Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri

To unleash the potential of mobile marketing, wireless carriers need to become more than just network providers.

There are two fundamental issues in the mobile marketing ecosystem:

• Why consumer-focused enterprises should consider mobile as an effective direct channel to reach their end consumers?

• What role should carriers play in the ecosystem to enable enterprises to realize the true potential of mobile marketing, create value for their mobile subscribers and develop an alternative revenue stream for themselves?

Context and relevance
With the current economic climate, companies are trying to make sure their marketing dollars yield projected ROI with maximum reach. Hence we see them stick to time-tested marketing channels.

So far mobile marketing has generally stood for SMS texts or banner ads, which is an imitation of the online advertising and marketing strategy. This strategy, though it may reach the masses, may not really work for mobile.

A mobile phone, being a personal device, is all about relevance and context.

Delivering the right marketing message at the right time and place is key to getting consumers to respond. The demographics, localization, time and usage preferences that can contextualize marketing on mobile cannot be easily achieved across other channels.

Mobile marketing goes beyond banners and texts. It can enable enterprises to collect information and build intelligence about the consumers, providing simple but relevant and helpful information to consumers and drive interactivity.

Mobile also offers a variety of delivery channels for marketing. Marketers have the flexibility of choosing a channel or a combination of channels they want to use to reach out to the consumers on the basis of what is effective, relevant and what makes economic sense to them.

Some mobile marketing delivery approaches such as proximity marketing, thanks to WiFi and Bluetooth, do not require the end user to spend a dime and hence they are even more likely to be adopted by mobile users.

Carriers are enablers
Significant opportunities exist for carriers in the mobile marketing value-chain. Relevance, be it user relevance, location relevance or context relevance, can be more effectively provided only by the carrier thanks to their deep knowledge about the consumers and their network assets.

Improved relevance goes a long way in determining the success of a mobile marketing campaign and also determines a consumer’s receptivity to such a campaign.

Mobile marketing adoption is always threatened by excessive targeting, leading to privacy concerns and the loss of acceptance among consumers.

Understandably, carriers are taking a cautious approach to the use of customer data and are reluctant to exploit such data. They can instill trust in consumers by being open and transparent, making it easy for them to opt-in or decide how their information is used.

The device diversity and the number of marketing channels on mobile create a significant cost barrier for marketers. Marketers will gravitate even more toward mobile marketing when carriers can offer a platform for them to reach their consumers without worry of diversity of devices and delivery channels.

Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri is senior business analyst at Infosys Technologies, Plano, TX. Reach him at .

Comments on "Carriers are key to mobile marketing"

1. Dharmendra Misra says:

   February 22, 2010 at 1:35am

   Ideas, concepts and its relevance to market/consumer is something that is more relevant to communication wave including marketing. Carriers per se own pipes and they need to focus on their core competency of managing pipes in most efficient way. Unfortunately, that is a commodity business and few consultants, including carriers are unable to digest it. Carriers are a part of supply chain of information and service. It is wrong to assume that they own supply chain, instead it is wrong to assume if any one owns supply chain end to end, even google or apple cannot. This is a chain that starts from subscriber and ends at subscriber. Therefore carriers are no way key to mobile marketing. I am confused even if carriers remain key player in their core services, if Skype can become largest voice generator, Apple can generate more traffic than Vodafone and if innovation can force operators to open up its network for third party content then operator's monopoly on services is questionable. It doesn't mean that they are irrelevant, carriers have major play in information supply chain but as pipes till they themselves dont become creative. Operators like Blyk are more relevant to mobile marketing than parent carriers

2. cal morton says:

   January 29, 2010 at 7:04pm

   The best thing that the U.S. carriers can do is stay OUT OF THE WAY!
   This is the only country where you literally, if you are following the guidelines, have to get EVERY key word (campaign) on a short code submitted to Neustar (usshortcodes) for approval by the carriers... and monitored by Nielson.
   Of course, nobody is doing that, its completely unworkable and we told them that.
   I started in mobile marketing over 6 years ago in the UK and moved back to the U.S. in May 06 to set up our offices here... this month due in large part to the Carriers constant meddling, audits, changing the playbook etc.
   Not to mention being the subject of a $90 million dollar law suit because 1 person claiming she hadn't opted-in to receive SMS from our client's client, was 'recruited' by a scum bag group of law firms in Chicago, to file a class action.
   (Btw, it was a std rate message from a short code)
   Anyway, got off topic, carriers are just pipes and it terrifies them...done.

3. Joe Grigsby says:

   January 21, 2010 at 9:28pm

   Francis Beaulieu has it right. Carriers have been trying to play a role in this space for years with no real success. They should focus on providing better networks and payment plans that drive higher ARPU through consumer data usage (think AT&Ts 3G network) vs. trying to become ad networks.

4. Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri says:

   January 21, 2010 at 5:28pm

   I understand that there have been difficulties in bringing together the Operator’s knowledge of the subscribers and the Brands’ marketing creativity. If Operator’s can play a key role in bridging this gap, the potential benefits outweigh the difficulties in integrating the 2 vastly different worlds. Operators have been slow to the party as the mobile marketing industry is still seen by them as a nascent industry with a lot of uncertainty around the business models and role they can potentially play.
   
   Brands can rely on the trusted relationship the Operators have with their customers. Brands can leverage this operator-consumer relationship to build customer intelligence (thru opt-ins and preferences) and deliver more relevant and successful campaigns. By playing a key role in the value chain, operators can also safeguard their customer base by providing a non-intrusive, positive experience.
   
   Another way to look at this is that Operators can leverage Mobile Marketing as a way to bring down the costs for data connectivity which is still too expensive for a lot of consumer segments. By providing such incentives, Operators can sign up more target customers to opt-in and receive marketing campaigns which in turn can benefit the brands.

5. Francis Beaulieu says:

   January 21, 2010 at 9:32am

   I'm sorry, but I totally disagree. Carriers are not a key to mobile marketing. Actually they need to stay out of it and be good at what they should be good at: operating a network.
   
   Data on users can be gathered other ways, easier ways, hell carriers have a hard time to even know what their user profiles are.
   
   Carriers have been a major road block in any initiative in the past. They want to control everything and by doing so, they slow down adoption.