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Forget Your Well-Thought-Out Mobile Strategy: You Now Need Three
Wi-Fi access is hardly universal, but it’s growing. This month saw players as different as Amtrak and McDonald’s offer consumers free wireless access (in select trains for Amtrak, in all stores for McDonald’s). The Wi-Fi factor could potentially impact your app and hardware and carrier choices in ways that it’s hard to envision today. And it will likely impact the different mobile categories very differently.
Down the road, some chains may want to play with approaches that morph mobile and social. Would stores want to facilitate—nay, possibly even encourage—customers to talk with each electronically? Perhaps a large bookstore—with 200 people milling around—might want to allow one customer to broadcast a message (limited to the store’s footprint) “Anyone here knowledgeable about (insert name of popular author)? If so, could we meet by the table near the front window? I need recommendations.” Perhaps it would be in a large toy store, with a new father broadcasting: “I’m a first-time father searching for a gift for my 18-month-old daughter. Any parents here who can help me out with ideas?”
If you want to do that kind of mobile social effort, it might impact your purchase strategy. Do you want the communications to all go through a store cloud? If so, you could be hardware/carrier-agnostic. But what if you want to deploy a more sophisticated app that perhaps factors in multimedia and geolocation data? Or perhaps an app that could be at its best when communicating from one Nexus One to another Nexus One? If you’re going to offer customers apps, then the customers’ devices become important again.
Will the phones use RFID to be part of your CRM program? Will geolocation be fine-tuned with aisle beacons so that the phone could navigate the customer right to the item? (Heck, with item-level RFID, it could even direct the consumer to a misfiled item.) Let’s really push merged channel: What if you want to allow customers to see a demo on a store kiosk and to then give those customers the option to download it to their phones for offline viewing from home?
Mobile is clearly a huge area and it will have a massive impact on the future of retail. But today’s attempts to squeeze it all into one bucket are simply counterproductive. The sooner the community internalizes that a BlackBerry acting as a smartcard at checkout has very little in common with an iPhone looking up prices and even less in common with that Nexus One engaged in an interactive SMS conversation between a call center associate and a customer trying to haggle on the price of a refrigerator, the better the chance that the chain’s mobile strategy—all three of them—will work.
-Marc
January 21st, 2010 at 9:55 am
The value proposition of mobility is multi-faceted because mobility is an enabler, not an end it itself. Mobility is actually a lot harder to do well than web-based applications. Networks are slower, devices are smaller (usability does matter) and there is no default mobile platform (hence the reason for carrying 3 phones) unlike the PC/Windows monopoly we love to hate. What is your mobile strategy? And perhaps just as importantly what is the strategy of the technology industry giants? Google is betting that the future lies with browser and micro-browser based applications, not app stores. These applications usually run on all mobile devices with an embedded browser. Apple and Research in Motion (BlackBerry) are trying to tie you in to writing “local” applications, distributed by an exclusive app-store (although RIM does allow over-the-air installers not using their app store), using their platform and API exclusively. The Google model gives you more portability and near universal support. It also does away with the updates/patches. The app is online and always up to date. This truly is software as a service. The Apple/RIM model gives you more local control, the ability to add peripherals (scanners) but does mean you have to write to one specific platform and install and update this software. Personally I believe that app stores are a stepping stone to a truly web service based world. I think the Google model will eventually eclipse the Apple/RIM model. Retailers should review their options and carefully evaluate which model is best for their current and future operations.
January 21st, 2010 at 10:10 am
ARTS has initially divided mobile apps into (1) Marketing and Loyalty, (2) Payments and m-Commerce, and (3) Operations (for employees), but your categories are interesting as well. Agree on the need for most retailers to address all three aspects, and the need for some sort of standardization of the platform. I have spoken with a couple companies that claim to automatically build native apps for different platforms from one source.
If each retailers builds 1-3 apps for 1-3 platforms, consumers will be overwhelmed. As more retailers enter this area, its going to get tougher to differentiate.
A few will get this right and lead the market.