January 2008
The mobile phone is set to play an even more important role in most of our lives. Just to think that only 20 years or so ago, most people thought of a phone as a big, heavy item attached to the wall.
Now most phones are mobile and can be a portable music device, a TV, a place to read and send emails, an electronic book, and even a payment device. Step by step the mobile phone is becoming a high performance, multi function ‘PC in your pocket’.
Japan led the way with the adoption of the mobile phone. And many of the new ways of using mobiles have been adopted there before spreading out to the rest of the world. In what is really a significant milestone, in 2007 sales of PCs in Japan fell for the first time. If this trend is to follow, then in the coming years we should start to see the steady decline of the PC and even further growth in the adoption and deployment of the mobile phone as a pocket PC.
While people have been able to surf the net on their mobile phones for some time, it has been difficult or expensive to transact via the phone.
In the early days transactions were processed by the telcos, and the costs were prohibitive. Over the past couple of years there have been a number of innovations in this area, bring the cost of transactions down to a more digestible figure.
PayPal recently unveiled Mobile Checkout to the Australian market. You need to have a PayPal account and the mobile payment registered to use this service. Merchants set up their own mobile websites and customers transact directly with these sites. This cuts out the telcos from the transaction. To buy via mobile, the customer texts a code from an ad or a poster. They then receive a text message or a call and they confirm the transaction using their PIN.
In November last year in London, a trial also commenced for a mobile with a built in credit card and ‘Oyster’ smart card. People can use the phone to buy Underground tickets, newspapers, coffee, etc. They simply run their phone over a scanner and the funds are automatically deducted. Although this sort of technology has been in place in Japan for some time, the London trial points to a new worldwide wave of extended use of the mobile.
In yet another pointer for the future, a Japanese university is now offering courses via the mobile. Students can watch Powerpoint-style images from the course which are streamed to the mobile’s screen.
Finally, the launch of the Apple iPhone and Google’s ‘open source’ foray into mobiles mean that the world of mobile phones is only likely to get more interesting over the coming years.
So what does all this mean? Well for marketers it means you are going to have to start thinking about the effect this could have for changing consumer behaviour in the future. And you’d better start planning how this will impact on the way you can market to your customers in the future. The changing world of mobiles offers many challenges, but it also offers many opportunities for those that are prepared to embrace the potential of the changing digital environment.