Curiosity is the best promotion
We’re working with a wide range of clients on approaches and strategies to move into the mCommerce space and also into the more general field of promoting mobile engagement with consumers. One of the ever-present subjects that keeps coming up, quite understandably, is that of driving acceptance, understanding and subsequent adoption of new mobile concepts in the mass market. Advertisers want to be early to the mobile game but they don’t want to bear the full responsibility for audience education.
A recent article outlines some of the issues that we and others are facing and also offers some great advice in the Mobile Tagging space – It’s based on an interview with Aaron Getz, the GM for Microsoft Tag. Getz details approaches that some US retailers are considering which will result in customer relationship goldmines should they be successfully implemented but therein lies the catch. For once, it’s not really the technology that’s the problem (Mobile Tagging works and is extremely easy to use); it’s far more about getting the consumers to interact with Tags in a comfortable second-nature manner.
We couldn’t agree more with the ‘Curiosity’ message delivered in the article:
Curiosity is the best promotion. Let consumers discover the tags and the system on their own, and ask for the application on their own, and true adoption will likely be much higher
In our experience, once you’ve won over a small number of consumers for a brand or organisation, word spreads extremely quickly. Try and push something too hard and all you’re going to do is put your target market on the defensive. There’s nothing new here, using a subset of your audience to ‘infect’ the rest is as old as the hills – the risky temptation is to ignore existing good-advice like this just because you’re looking at a new technology.
Interestingly, the ‘curiosity’ angle leads into another discussion – whether a Mobile Tag should be a subtle addition to advertising or a product display, or whether it should be designed to stand out and really be noticeable. Our view is that it’s hard to spur curiosity without at least making your message consistent, noticeable and clearly something that is important enough to justify real-estate. If you’re hiding the Tag away so it’s hard to find or notice, how serious are you about driving engagement using the mobile channel, really?
