Measuring Push-Type Mobile Campaigns

Creating positive experiences in mobile marketing campaigns is contingent upon successfully meeting the requirements of the mobile medium. However, general practice in industry diverges from this conceptual argument. The foremost reason for this is the fact that response rate is often used as the ultimate success measure of push-type mobile marketing campaigns. Consequently, marketers focus on increasing short-term popularity and response rate of their campaigns by either incorporating immediate generic incentives and/or targeting users solely on the basis of responsiveness. Although response rate provides (limited) information about the short-term positive effect of a mobile campaign on consumer engagement, it gives absolutely no information regarding campaign-related perceptions, attitudes and more importantly dissatisfaction of non-responders.

The use of response rate, in the form of click-through rate, as a success measure is inherited from digital marketing through the PC-based wired Internet. However, the Internet allows tracking of the interactivity data as well. Interactivity data, in the form of time spent in a page, number of pages viewed, most popular navigation patterns through the site, exit patterns, revisits, the most and least popular pages, indicates the extent to which a visitor likes or dislikes an ad or a website as a whole. These metrics can also be used for measuring success in campaigns that are based on mobile Internet, mobile apps, and even in IVR; however they are not available for marketers in push-type message delivery (e.g., SMS ads) through the mobile medium. Therefore, success in push-type mobile marketing is measured solely by response and exposure rate, none of which provide any information about the effect of the campaign on non-responders. Furthermore, the antecedents of response and the attitude toward the campaign may be completely different. Such that, responders may be driven by the instant-win incentive embedded in the campaign, even if they have perceived the message as intrusive or disliked it. Therefore, let alone non-responders, response rate cannot provide concise information even about the satisfaction of the responders. Unfortunately, there are no other metrics that can be used as a success measure in SMS-based push-type mobile marketing. This is where the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of the mobile medium kicks in. Instead of targeting users solely based on their likelihood of response, a better strategy may be employing targeting and personalization with a focus on reducing intrusiveness.

Why intrusiveness is so important? Because, intrusiveness causes consumer irritation, which in turn triggers the desire to get away from the marketing message. In worse cases, this mechanism may result in negative reactions or attitudes towards the marketing campaign and the medium through which marketing stimulus is delivered. Since attitudes toward advertising are known to influence attitudes toward brands, misuse of push-type mobile marketing may result in brand suicide.

First of all, marketers who are trapped in the PC-based Internet paradigm should change their mindsets, and acknowledge the fact that the “Mobile” is not an extension of the wired Internet. When compared to PCs, mobile devices are used in a different context, represent different meanings to users, and present a different set of value propositions. Therefore, competitive advantage will accrue to the marketers who understand the true nature of the mobile medium, and employ medium-specific targeting strategies and measurement metrics for achieving superior consumer experiences in mobile marketing campaigns.

What are we doing in Facebook? And why the answer to this question is so important for marketers?

According to Facebook’s mission statement it exists to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Well, it gave us the power to share and by using this power we made the world more open. First, we shared with our friends what we found entertaining or informing. Then we started to post more personal stuff in our profiles. We became very concerned about what our profiles say about ourselves. In time, we became entrapped in the process because everyone we know and potentially the rest of world were so into it. We shared photos, videos, comments, our thoughts and feelings, hobbies, friends, friends of friends and eventually we started to share everything that serves our purpose of sharing. The important question is: What is that purpose? If marketers can get a clue on that, they’ll be able to provide people with stuff that will serve that particular purpose. Such content will naturally blend in and get disseminated through online publics with no cost at all.

Findings of our latest research suggests that impression management is the key motivation for sharing content in social networking sites and people purposefully share content in order to keep up their impressions. Before associating themselves with a particular content on social networking sites, people carefully judge how that association will reflect on their self-image. A profile is then perceived as an online representation of the self. So what we do in Facebook, as danah boyd so beautifully postulates, is essentially “writing ourselves into being”. People have the innate need for social approval and belongingness, and strive to establish desired social identities. Facebook is so widely adopted because it allows people to carefully structure their desired impressions by making selective self-disclosures and making their social associations (group memberships) known to the others, especially significant others. Well, existing market research shows that only a small portion of people actually create content. The majority of people just shares what they find online. Marketers can leverage this opportunity by providing people with stuff to share, because basically people are readily motivated to share. The lesson to take home here is that, people will more likely “pick-up and forward” a digital content when it fortifies their desired self-image. Therefore, in order to facilitate a strong viral effect, apart from employing the common practice of preparing shocking or entertaining content, marketers may also benefit from concentrating on the desired self-images of their target customers, figure out what kind of a sharing would enhance that self-image, and design brand-related content accordingly.

Mobile Marketing: Fundamentals & Strategy

A Blueprint for Mobile Marketing Best Practices by Kaan Varnali, Aysegul Toker and Cengiz Yilmaz

‘Drawing on lessons from one of Europe’s most successful telecommunications companies, Mobile Marketing expertly explains the rules and lessons of the emerging mobile world. This is must reading for the marketing professional.’
Malcolm Gladwell

‘Digital will change advertising more than it did the music business. Mobile digital will be the true hero of this radical change. This book is about the early signs of this revolution. A must-read.’
Serdar Erener, Adman

‘Turkcell has proved to be one of the innovators and drivers of mobile marketing throughout EMEA. It therefore comes as no surprise that they should produce such a comprehensive guide to mobile marketing. The book contains both simple overviews of the prevailing technologies found in mobile marketing and more importantly some clear guidance on how to use them.’
Paul Berney, Managing Director Europe, Mobile Marketing Association

‘The authors have done a terrific job discussing the compelling case studies and carefully elaborating on the lessons learned. Mobile marketing is a very effective way to engage consumers and brands to create a win-win solution, and this book explains how to achieve it.’
Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting, and coauthor of Mobile Advertising

Available at book stores:  McGraw-Hill Professional, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Paddyfield, Amazon

Social Media Week Istanbul

Istanbul Bilgi University will be hosting the last three days of Social Media Week at Santral Istanbul on February 9-10-11, 2011. Please find the event schedule here.

As a member of the advisory board of Social Media Week Istanbul and as the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Communication I am proud to invite you all to our glamorous campus to attend Social Media Week through which we will discuss, co-explore, and co-learn a variety of concepts related with social media. Don’t miss it.

 

How pathetic an internet service provider can be? The story of TTNET

While reading, please keep in mind that TTNET is the market leader internet service provider company in Turkey. Here is the incredibly funny dialogue I had with an employee of the TTNET call center:

K.V.: Hello, I can not connect to my domain kaanvarnali.com from Istanbul, while all my friends around the world can view it. I have talked with the hosting company. They have informed me that the block is out of their control and their server works perfectly fine, and that I should talk with my local internet service provider about the problem. Could you please help me out?

TTNET Call Center: I have checked your internet connection from your home it works perfectly fine. There is no problem.

K.V.: There is nothing wrong with my internet connection. There is something wrong with TTNET’s infrastructure because kaanvarnali.com is unreachable from Turkey, while it works perfectly fine for the rest of the world.

TTNET Call Center: But sir, I have checked your internet connection it works fine.

K.V.: It seems that you can not understand my problem. Is there someone else that I can talk to regarding the problem.

TTNET Call Center: Sorry sir, there is no one else.

K.V.: Don’t you have a superior officer, or a technician who knows stuff about routers and connectivity problems.

TTNET Call Center: Yes we have, but they won’t talk to you that’s not the procedure.

K.V.: Ok. Let’s do this – please try to connect to kaanvarnali.com. You will see that you can not connect. I am running a trace route and see that my request to connect to the IP address 64.202.189.170 times out. However there is nothing wrong with the server. There is a block along the way.

TTNET Call Center: Sir, I can not do as you say because we don’t have internet access here.

K.V.: What? So what do you suggest me to do about my problem?

TTNET Call Center: I have checked your home’s Internet connection, there is no problem. So there is nothing more we can do.

… and it goes on like this…

Long story short: The only customer contact point of TTNET is its call center, which has no Internet access. Further, people who work there are unable to grasp a simple connectivity problem. And they can not offer any solution. No where to go. No one to talk to. That’s it. They simply say: “Live with it.”

I have a domain (kaanvarnali.com) that is registered and hosted by GoDaddy, but no one in my country can reach it. Impressive right?

“Virtual” does not mean “Unreal” anymore!

Today one of my students made an intriguing comment about how wrong the interaction through social media is perceived by those who are trapped in the old-gone paradigm. We were discussing the impact of new media on children. While the presenter was showing a slide about the negative impact of new media on children, a statement taken from an article of a columnist appeared on the board. It said: Today, children spend too much time online hence they become asocial beings who do not spend enough time with their friends anymore. The protest was as follows: “It is incredibly wrong. I get so frustrated when people suggest that social media is making children asocial. They are more social then our parents ever were.”

He is absolutely correct. There is a discrepancy between how reality is perceived and lived by digital natives and those who are immigrants in the digital world (in other words “us”). Digital natives experience their online presence more vividly and they can hardly differentiate the nature of online and offline interaction. In their world, online and offline has always been intertwined. Hence, online interaction is a need for them to keep up with their peers. Their sense of community is totally different and in some cases the reach of their social ties goes far beyond the imagination of their parents. Online channels are important for them to engage in social exchanges with their community and these exchanges are crucial for the development of their social character that suits the nature of this new world. It is time for us to grasp the fact that digital natives live in a completely different paradigm, which has a brand new set of norms and social practices. In this new paradigm, “Virtual” does not mean “Unreal” anymore!

Mobile Marketing: the unleashed beast

“Mobile Marketing”, the buzz word referring to all marketing initiatives that at some point utilize the mobile medium for interacting or communicating with consumers, has been keeping all of us incredibly busy in the last few years. Marketing agencies are trying to keep up with the rate of technological development and find ways to incorporate the mobile channel in their multi-channel campaigns. Application developers, thrilled by the buzz, are frantically pursuing almost each and every idea to create various types of apps. Brands, being hypnotized by the self-advertising of the mobile industry, are rushing to adopt mobile marketing practices without properly weighing their pros and cons. Policy makers are trying to come-up with new regulations and protection acts that adequately address privacy and security concerns, but despite their best efforts they are always lagging behind. Academics are trying to understand the adoption of mobile marketing in consumer markets, but they also can merely  keep up with the rate of change in various aspects of mobile ecosystem (e.g., types of applications, improvements in technology, changes in consumer attitudes and perceptions).

In theory, the mobile medium provides the perfect vehicle to reach on-the-go consumers. In reality, though, the success of mobile marketing campaigns has been mixed. This is largely due to the fact that many companies jump the boat without understanding the true nature of the phenomenon. Why do they do that? It is simple: When a new technology shines as bright as the “mobile” does, it is hard to resist the temptation to use it. The mobile offers brands to create a pervasive electronic presence alongside their existing and potential customers that senses and responds not only to who the customer is, but where she is and what she is doing. It may be the ultimate tool for contextual marketing. Is this the only reason? Well, it may be a pull factor for brands, but the concept of mobile marketing has also been pushed by a giant and very powerful league of companies, mobile operators.  Due to agressive competition, profit margins from mature voice markets started to fall. In order to sustain operating margins, it has become crucial for mobile network operators to enrich their range of services and create a market for these new services. So they have tried very hard to educate the market about the benefits and opportunities offered by the use of mobile medium for marketing purposes, and proliferate a new value chain, which did not exist until very recently. Today, the mobile value chain which consists of various types of players (marketing agencies, aggregators, content providers, application developers, etc.) provide lucrative revenues for mobile network operators. We, as academics have praised mobile marketing as the next technologically  driven wave of marketing which creates unique value propositions through the specific dimensions of ubiquity, convenience, flexibility, localization, and personalization. Advertising industry had quickly foreseen their share of potential benefits and hence rapidly adopted and heavily marketed the practice of mobile marketing. Consequently, the beast was unleashed.

But, the beast was unleashed before it was properly tamed. From a consumer-centric point of view, mobile marketing provides superior value-for-time offering that other marketing media can not achieve. It has basically transformed the way consumers interact with advertising, brands, and with each other. Many activities became spatially and temporally flexible in a world with mobile technologies. Therefore, its rapid take-off and high penetration is understandable. However, those features of mobile medium that make it excel on value propositions, also make it a very dangerous tool that can be used by greedy and/or ill-informed marketers. Those marketers do not only harm their brands with inappropriate use of mobile marketing practices but also harm the entire mobile marketing industry by causing negative consumer attitudes towards mobile marketing as a whole. More importantly, their practices raise important consumer policy issues that may have serious negative consequences. The high penetration of mobile devices among minors create serious risks of over-consumption and access to inappropriate content. Also, the high penetration of mobile devices among relatively less educated segments of the population create risk of unrealized disclosure of personal information and make them vulnerable for various types deception. Other issues include security of mobile payments, unsolicited sales, inadequate disclosure of campaign-related information, assumed opt-in, unauthorized use of personal information, and SMS spam. In terms of the legal framework, very few laws or measures specifically address issues in mobile marketing, therefore taming the beast becomes the duty of those who survive on the revenues generated by the beast. Although it seems a bit ironic, actually it is not. Because, the members of the mobile value chain have started to realize that the longterm survival of their industry depends on reducing these concerns regarding the use of mobile marketing in consumer markets. Otherwise, policy makers will have no choice but to give in to the demands of consumer groups, associations, and activists and apply heavy regulations to the industry, which will eventually shrink the game space to an extent where making innovations will no longer be profitable. Such a situation is good for no one. Thus, in order to create positive customer experiences and keep the beast unleashed, marketers will need to develop a complete understanding of the unique characteristics of the mobile medium before employing mobile marketing practices.

Understanding New Media in the Context of Marketing

What is new media?

The answer you give to this question reveals the level of understanding you have over the concept of “New Media”. If you begin explaining the concept of “New Media” by counting new media vehicles (e.g., mobile medium, social networking platforms, user generated online content, online gaming, etc.) one by one and if you still consider them as separate innovative modalities of consumer communication, then unfortunately you are trapped in the past paradigm. But don’t worry, it is not too late for you, the paradigm shift is occurring right now!

So what is new media? “New Media” refers to the single medium that surrounds us. Don’t let the plural form of the term fool you, it actually refers to a single seamlessly-integrated medium. It is made up of a variety of media, yet is more than the sum of its parts.  It can be characterized by the concepts of “ubiquity” and “convergence”. It is the joint product of the inevitable convergence of communication technologies and the proliferation of pervasive computing. Understanding this new phenomenon requires understanding the new breed of consumers who have grown up in the digital age. They differ from the rest of us in terms of their patterns of interaction with digital media, trust and involvement in new technologies, the way they present and disclose themselves in online environments, the way they perceive others’ online presence, the way they are connected to others via digital media, and most importantly in terms of their needs. Their expectations and demands from communication technologies drive the ever-continuing evolution of the “New Media”.

Early pioneering scholarly works envisioned the Internet as a driver so significant that it would transform even the most basic premises of the business environment. Peterson, Balasubramanian and Bronnenberg (1997) stated that “The Internet can be considered a market discontinuity because it represents a shift in any of the market forces or their interrelationships that can not be predicted by a continuation of historical trends and that, if it occurs, can dramatically affect the performance of a firm or an industry” (p. 330). Achrol and Kotler (1999) described the growth of e-commerce as the single biggest opportunity and threat facing almost every industry.  Today the technological basis of the Internet became more robust, and the population of technology-confident, to some degree technology-dependent consumers consist much of the economically developed societies. We are coming towards the end of the first generation of online consumers. Latest advances in communication technologies allow a virtual experience that is engaging, highly interactive, and vividly memorable. These technologies become integrated in a way that users are able move from one to another almost unconsciously with no interruption. Information uploaded via one medium can be reached from others with almost no limitations. Online profiles are so complete that some even tell the real-time location of owners. The amount of media a person used to consume in a month can now be downloaded in minutes and carried in a tiny device with a size of a lipstick. Today, movies are shown on cell phones, TVs are present everywhere, print and outdoor ads interact with cell phone cameras, bank accounts are reached through handheld devices, and radio is broadcasted through the Internet. Media technologies are morphing and converging, and consequently creating a single medium where information is abundant and conveniently reached. In recent years numerous mobile applications that leverage unique properties of the mobile medium have been introduced (e.g., location-based services, mobile TV, mobile payment schemes, mobile coupons and tickets, mobile tagging, etc.) and these applications have fueled this transformation.

In developed economies and some developing countries, a considerable portion of younger consumers spend more time in social networking sites and playing online multi-player games than they do in real-life social events. All aspects of human-computer interaction and human-to-human interaction via digital environments is perceived and experienced completely differently by this new generation. This fact causes tremendous shifts in communication patterns both among consumers and between brands and consumers. Since marketing is about understanding, communicating with, and delivering value to consumers, academics and marketers will have to adapt to the change driven by the convergence of media technologies and the birth of the hybrid media consumer. Competitive advantage will accrue to the service providers who develop a comprehensive understanding of the concept of “New Media” and adapt to the ongoing paradigm shift. The ability to provide superior consumption experiences is contingent upon this requirement. Therefore, the theoretical and pragmatic value of understanding the true nature of “New Media” is tremendous, and I hope this article will serve as a stimulating food for thought in this respect.

References

Achrol, R.S. & Kotler, P. (1999). Marketing in the network economy. Journal of Marketing, 63, 146 – 163.

Peterson, R.A., Balasubramanian, S. & Bronnenberg, B.J. (1997). Exploring the Implications of the Internet for Consumer Marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 25(4), 329 – 346.