The New KISS (Keep It Segmented, Stupid!)

Ed: Our “MoComment” section has guest essays and commentary from industry players. If you’re interested in writing about an issue related to mobile content industry, send us an e-mail. Previous essay are here.
This essay is by Brojo Pillai, co-founder PurpleAce, who writes about the problem with finding content on the mobile handset and recommendation services as one solution to that…

Brojo Pillai, co-founder PurpleAceThe direct marketing revolution of the 1970s and 1980s pointed us towards a new way to sell. The scatter-gun, big bang approach of traditional advertising disappeared, the remnants either morphed into the newish discipline of branding or were replaced by the focussed spend offered by direct response, which promised to make every marketing dollar count for more.

With the evolution and spread of mobile telephony a decade later, a medium made for direct marketing seemed to have been born. Where once creativity alone had ruled, suddenly demographics and the database became the marketer’s best friend.

But with those sea-changes, into the mix came challenges like the need to make sense of concepts like the “personalised” campaign, distributed to many millions of names at a time. In the “direct” world, marketers supposedly knew what they were doing – selling in-demand products to highly targeted prospect groups. But a lot of the time they weren’t (and still aren’t) doing it right.

In reality, the theory has outstripped the practice. In so far as mobile marketing was delivered direct to a targeted recipient, everything was looking good. Trouble is, the targeting has rarely been quite right.

Thankfully, when direct marketing doesn’t work it’s not the concept that’s at fault, stupid! It’s the details. If you go to the wrong people at the wrong time, even if you address them by their first names and say “please” before you make your pitch, the fat lady simply isn’t going to sing (in tones polyphonic, monophonic, or otherwise.)

And particularly in the mobile world, the fact is that traditional (read: limited) approaches to segmentation rarely rouse the fat lady from her slumber, not least because by now she’s probably seen your offer at least once before already. If your approach to targeting your customers is limited to working within broad demographic boundaries then there can be little doubt that you are missing out.

The reality is that the direct marketing of new products via mobile may not be new any longer. But if you want to do it effectively, limiting yourself to basing campaigns on standard targeting methodologies is not going to work.

Let’s look at the details. Marketing a large catalogue of content and services to a diverse audience, via a small screen, is a serious challenge. The typical model for content marketing is the “supermarket model” with – thinking wishfully — the screen representing shelf space. The catalogue is tailored for the mass-market, in order to appeal to a broad base of users, in the absence of a personalised storefront.

Research shows that consumers are in principle responsive to mobile content and willing to increase the amount they spend over data services each month. But the reality is that as often as not they don’t actually do this because the content they’re presented with is all too often not interesting enough, and furthermore what they really want is difficult to find. In short, the breakdown lies in the marketing. And as service providers struggle to maintain margins while accelerating the introduction of new content (mass-market, branded, expensive yet undifferentiated), the life of each content item (and therefore its ROI) reduces and the need to solve the problem of marketing simultaneously increases.

Ironically, a conflicting position then develops: it is not possible to market a diverse range of content to consumers through current distribution models, yet that is exactly what is necessary in order to make the concept work. The solution is to alter the model of distribution of content and services so that prospective buyers can actually arrive somewhere they’re interested in going, over a mobile device. Put such an approach in place and you enable the migration from a supermarket model of content distribution to a more effective model that increases the return on each content or service item, and increases the spend of each consumer.
When you do this, as consumers browse through a portal they are constantly guided with personalised recommendations (“We recommendâ

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