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Wednesday 16 July 2014

Brands falling short on mobile

Warc, 5 August 2013
NEW YORK: Mobile marketing still suffers from a "mismatch" when compared to actual consumer behaviour, a multimarket study has revealed.

Research firm Forrester questioned internet users who owned mobile phones in the US and European markets like France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

It found that 47% of European participants utilised mobile apps at least once a week, a figure standing at 47% for accessing the internet via the same route and 38% for visiting search engines on their phone.

Looking at the US, exactly 50% of respondents checked news, sports updates and weather forecasts on a weekly basis on these devices, alongside 45% logging on to social networks and 22% for researching products.

"This implies that you must have a mobile component for your digital strategy. But it goes beyond this, as mobile is bridging the offline and online worlds," said Thomas Husson, a principal analyst at Forrester.

Forrester's survey of senior marketers found that most were trialling mobile technologies, but 42% had been pursuing such a strategy for less than a year or were in "the early stages of building one".

An additional 43% of executives agreed they were not highly informed about the mobile behaviour of their customers.

Equally, just 45% had defined a clear "road map" for this medium covering the next six months and only 37% believed they possessed the necessary budget to pursue their mobile initiatives.

"There is still a mismatch between customers' and marketers' mobile usage," Husson said. This applies both in terms of mobile-readiness, but also the tactics and tools they are using.

Marketers tend to focus on building native mobile apps, he continued, and effectively spend money when they do not have to. Moreover, few have connected their apps with customer relationship management systems.

Similarly, the deployment of "trendy" technologies like QR codes and augmented reality is often out of keeping with consumer uptake, often to the neglect of mainstream options like SMS or the mobile web.

"There is a disconnect between technologies rolled out and regular usage among customers," Husson continued. "Unfortunately, the reality is that the passion for mobile technology acronyms - NFC, AR, LTE, RWD, QR, etc. - still prevails."


Data sourced from Forrester; additional content by Warc staff

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