Mobile Marketing

Mobile Advertising : a new communication media

Mobile marketing is becoming the most productive and cost effective medium for reaching a highly desirable demographic. It purposes are numerous : canvassing, building up customer loyalty and of course selling. The mobile phone is a good tool to exchange information with customers with several medium : Small Message Service (SMS), Mini Message Service (MMS), video MMS or internet. Today, it is also possible to pay with your mobile phone and some people think that mobile-phones will replace credit-cards or loyalty-cards in a next future.

The mobile marketing is born thanks to a huge development of high-technologies, which allow to have high-performances cell-phones. It is particularly targeted on young people, who use cell phones of the new generation.

The market on mobile marketing should reach 150 millions of dollars in 2006 (three times more comparing to 2005). The market will grow very quickly to reach 1 billion of dollars in 2009.

Companies such as AvantGO were born, just in order to provide services in terms of Mobile Marketing Advertising and Campaigns. Services provided include a huge database and mobile research surveys. Some major companies trust in AvantGo to build their mobile website : American Airlines or Rolling Stone for instance.

Building up customers loyalty : it is common acknowledged that it costs about five times less to build up loyalty with a customer than to find another one. That is why companies have to focus on existing customers. And because they often have a databases with a lot of information about their customers (including mobile phone numbers), sending SMS or MMS is an easy way to reach customers. And when effective, this type of campaign can contribute to significant brand awareness and loyalty, especially for a young demographic. Today most ambitious marketers try to associate a specialist ringtone or wallpaper with their brand. They are convinced that it could spread awareness of their own brand.

Canvassing : the method to canvass people with mobile marketing is not difficult. Companies have to buy a cell-phone database or to constitute it by their own, corresponding to their respective targets and then to send a message and/or pictures. They can ad an internet website, a call-centre number.

Selling: in Japan and South-Korea it is already possible to pay small bills like restaurants, cinema seats or public transports with mobile phones. The concept is being tested in the USA now. The principle is to integrate a small card in cell phones which purpose it to substitute it for several cards of a classical wallet (credit-card, transport-card, parking-card or loyalty-card).

Unwanted text messages are becoming a growing nuisance for consumers, who are often confused about how they received such messages.

That is why, it is important to secure, but not restrict this new communication media. It exist a code of conduct which gives guiding principles for best practice and ethical conduct. The proposed legislation will set very clear guidelines, heavily penalise those that do not comply

with this legislation. The purpose of this legislation is to promote responsible use of all electronic messages, including SMS and MMS.

The Mobile Marketing Association is an organisation that purpose is to stimulate the growth of this kind of marketing but also to establish standards and best practices. It is represented in

more than 40 countries. Members are advertisers, software providers, service providers and any companies attracted by this new concept of Mobile Marketing.

There are a lot of advantages of this new media of communication :

* Launching a Mobile Advertising campaign is much attractive than a classical campaign (TV, Radio, poster advertising) in terms of costs.

* It is a "brand-to-person" communication. It means that there are no intermediation between the advertiser and the target of the advertisement. And you also can deliver a persuasive message personal message.

* You can deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person. That is why it provides stronger recall rates than television advertising.

* Marketing is more than advertising, it is also establishing a private contact with customers. Mobile marketing allows it.

* Phones are rarely more