Marketing in a mobile-first world: Tackling the why and the how

When my son was still a toddler, I used to spend a lot of time around him. It was fun to watch him teaching himself to do the things that we as grown-ups take for granted. Once in a while, though, he would do something that gave me a new direction to think in. On one occasion, I was surfing channels on the TV and playing with the remote in my hand. My son was close by, engrossed in studying the underbelly of the coffee table. As I flipped through channels, a kids’ programme was playing his favourite nursery rhymes. I kept surfing without a second thought, but the few notes he heard caught his attention. He immediately left the coffee table alone and went to the TV screen. Then, using his tiny fingers on the screen, he started swiping, as if to go back to the previous channel. It caught my eye and I felt a sense of elation that only fathers can feel when they spend very little time with their sons. Excitedly, I called up my wife and narrated what had happened. Her flat voice was enough to tell me that he had done this several times before.

That’s probably the first time the marketer in me started to think about the ‘mobile-first’ generation seriously. Initially, I just thought of it as a demographic target audience. It seemed that many children between 7 and 12 years of age from urban, well-to-do homes around the world have had their first brush with technology in the form of a mobile device. They think differently because access to the internet and ease of use was built into the technology that they started with.

My work over the past 2 years, across several markets, has forced me to relook at this definition because this behaviour extends beyond just ‘Millennial kids’. Most emerging markets are teeming with a far bigger set of such people, well beyond the Millennials. Let’s look at how this is reshaping India and the challenges that marketers face in such markets.

India is a country of 1.2 billion people and the average age of the population is 24 years. That’s a lot of very young people, many of whom are part of a growing middle class. They have big dreams and aspirations and a belief that tomorrow belongs to them. They are all alike and yet each one of them tries to stand out from the crowd. There is a real sense of ‘the world around me is improving and I need to do much more to compete in it’.

The mobile landscape in India is very different from most developed countries, too. There are over 800 million mobile phone connections in India today. No, there was no typo there. According to the annual study done by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), there are 868 million mobile subscribers in India. Of these, IAMAI estimates the rural mobile subscriber base to be close to 343 million already. The study, conducted in the first half of 2013, also estimates that there are close to 431 million handsets that are internet-capable already.

Disruptive growth usually comes on the back of an unfulfilled need. The mobile growth story in India is no exception. The Indian subcontinent is one of the largest landmasses in the world. Post independence, the market continued to have very low penetration levels of landlines. Therefore, mobiles phones thrived and penetration galloped. Similarly, home PCs were costly to buy and difficult to maintain, making them accessible only to a privileged few. Data consumption on the back of mobile usage has grown far faster and is much more democratic in its reach. A young, aspiring population always had the need; the market simply catered to it.

Tablets and phablets from local and global firms find traction among millions. To feed on this hunger, telecom giants are doling out data packs like Santa Claus, and platforms like Facebook and Google are ensuring that there is enough reason and content to consume that data. With a big, young population, new habits are easier to form. Changes that took a decade or more in developed countries are happening in many emerging markets in just 1 year.

The interesting thing is that, even in markets where conditions may be different, some of this behaviour gets replicated. For example, in a country like Myanmar, which is just waking up to the world’s attention, this generation finds a way out. Myanmar has only one telecom provider today and data speeds aren’t great. Young men and women in Yangon spend almost 35 per cent of their monthly pocket money on the basic service. Data from the telecom service provider is too costly to consume, and therefore they live off the wi-fi hubs that businesses around the city have put up. Retailers, cafes and so on have figured out that a good wi-fi network can pull in a much bigger crowd than their best ‘20 per cent off’ promotions can. It’s a win-win for both. At the other end of the spectrum, countries like many in the Middle East, where PCs and laptops are aplenty, the younger generation lives its life on the mobile screen. Smartphone penetration in Saudi Arabia and the UAE is upwards of 150 per cent.

What is common across all of these markets is the fact that the mobile is a very important and prized possession. It is a window to the world around consumers, while simultaneously letting them maintain their own space in the middle of all the chaos. Suffice it to say that ‘personal’ has a new meaning altogether in this socially connected world.

In late 2013, Google launched its new advertising campaign in India. It told the story of two very old friends, one from India and the other from Pakistan. In a series of videos, the narrative unfolded as the two friends (with help from their grandchildren) used Google Search to trace each other’s whereabouts after almost 60 years of separation. On the face of it, there was nothing odd. It’s a brand (Google Search) trying to show how it can be used to find what its consumers want. The odd thing was the debate around why Google Search needed to advertise itself in the first place.

Let me explain this in detail. Google is in the business of providing information on demand. It has multiple products in its portfolio, but Search is still its bread and butter. In most emerging markets that I work in, consumer adoption of mobile is threatening this primary revenue stream. Most of us have spent the last decade starting every search from Google’s home page on the web. This is because we belong to either the ‘digital natives’ or the ‘digital immigrants’ generation. We are now simply carrying this habit forward to our smartphones.

But the ‘mobile-first’ generation never had the google.com habit. Their first interaction with the net was on a phone screen. Smartphones work with apps. The app world is domain-specific and task-specific. If I needed info on where to eat I would go to the Zomato app, or if I needed help with travel I would go to the Tripadvisor app directly. Google Search has a much smaller share in making this information available to us on the phone. Therefore, while the ad campaign details the virtues of Search, almost all usage is depicted via mobile phones. The message to the target audience is clear — Google Search works as well on mobile. Try it!

Google is doing everything from giving out the Android platform for free to advertising on TV. It wants to ensure that this next generation of mobile-first users continues to use its products just as frequently as the one before it. Thus, Google in its advertising and me in my domain are trying to achieve the same task — keeping our businesses relevant to this mobile-first generation. If this is something your business needs too, read on.

What follows is a synopsis of the process that I follow for my projects. Having conceptualized and executed more than a few mobile-based marketing projects this way, the process has been tested and tweaked enough and is now ready to share. Moreover, we have been able to replicate the process with brand after brand, market after market. It has been used for new brand launches, market expansion projects, share-gain tasks and to create relevance for layered propositions. When executed correctly, it has helped us strengthen the core of the brand, make effective distribution gains and reduce dependence on other marketing and trade programmes. So here goes.

As leadership expert Simon Sinek says, ‘always start with the why’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html). That one simple question can have over a dozen honest answers, depending on the marketer’s motivation. Some of these motivations can be driven by a business need and some by the spirit of innovation, while still others can be as basic as ‘wanting to stand out’ or ‘doing something new’.

In my experience, some of the more sustainable motivations involve a dynamic, either about the business that you belong to or the consumer that you want to talk to — or both.

Either way, just write down one simple sentence as an answer to the ‘why do it’ question and get going. We can revisit it later, if we want to.

You already answered why you should be doing it. That first step came from the gut. Step 2 allows you to build ‘flesh and muscle’ onto that ‘Why’. Get a bird’s eye view of your business, its ability to continue to stay afloat and your deliverables in it. Then fill out the two sets of statements given below:

I don’t know a single marketer who works alone. There are always multiple team members and multiple agency partners around. I think it’s a good thing, too. It helps to bring diverse points of view to the table, encourages debate, and makes room for different specialities and capabilities to be included.

The other option is to pull in some super-specialist agency. We will need great capability partners, but this is not the stage to hook them in. Right now, the team should contain members who have a great understanding of the business and really feel the need to make a big shift in the way we market to this generation.

The next task is to deep-dive on numbers. A marketer’s interest in any medium is primarily guided by the promise of mass reach at low cost. The mobile phone spends the most amount of time with your audience, allows two-way engagement and reaches a large proportion of the audience. It’s crucial to get hard numbers for time spent, usage occasions, frequency of use, reach and so on.

For my work, I try and get a grasp on the macro numbers first and then add the insights-rich information to it. But, in most emerging markets, it is also important to look beyond the aggregate numbers. The data doesn’t always give you a complete picture of ground-level realities. For example, official figures from the telecom service provider would peg data usage in Myanmar at extremely low levels, leading a marketer to believe that it is a feature phone market. Yet, the reality is that Facebook is extremely popular in the country and almost 80 per cent of all net users access the social networking site regularly.

Similarly, in the UAE, while smartphone penetration is 150 per cent, it differs vastly between the Arab, European and Asian populations. Again, within the Asian population itself, the preference for smartphones and data-enabled handsets is much higher among the younger 20-somethings than the 30-plus working generation. In Bangladesh, internet penetration is miniscule, yet various blogs and Facebook are used as a source of updating information about the volatile goings-on in the country.

The third thing to do is to craft the objective. Steps 1 and 2 were more personal and came largely from your own experience, vision and motivation. The objective should be crafted as a team project. You should use your material from the earlier steps, as well as data collected as part of this step, and use all of these as triggers for the team. One important aspect of the objective is that it must have an ambition worth chasing. In mobile marketing terms, this usually translates into chasing big numbers. Even if you operate in a developed economy and are trying to reach a high-end, affluent yet elusive audience, this principle holds.

If your audience size is massive, you can use whole numbers for greater effect. For one of our recent projects where we wanted our audience to consume content and recommend us to others, we set ourselves the objective ‘Get 1 m consumers to consume at least two pieces of content. Of those who consume it, 20 per cent should also recommend us to others’. This objective, once crafted and signed off, became our sole focus and drove the team hard right through the duration of the project. We crossed the 1 million mark 2 weeks ago and are currently tracking 31 per cent recommendation rates.

The team, the data and the objective. Your pack of three is ready to take the next step.

This is possibly the most crucial step in the entire process. Note that we are not creating an advertising campaign to reach consumers. We are designing a marketing project that will continue to reach the audiences we defined in Step 2 in order to deliver the objective agreed by the team in Step 3.

Early in the design process, I recommend the use of Heylen’s Model ² (or any other attitude-motivation mapping mechanism that your team is familiar with). Obviously, Heylen’s Model wasn’t made for designing mobile marketing projects, but given what we want to deliver, it can be tweaked to serve the purpose. The X-axis stretches from ‘group/family’ orientation on its left edge to ‘individual’ orientation on its right edge (see Figure 1). Similarly, the Y-axis starts from ‘outward manifestations’ at the top and ends with ‘inward manifestations’ at the bottom. The canvas provided by these two axes becomes the fertile ground for many team debates and discussions.

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Heylen’s Model thus results in a two-dimensional scheme such that all expressions of human behaviour can be located therein. The model allows the team to place their brand and their approach on the 2 × 2 matrix. It throws up certain codes on what motivations can work and what tonality will be required to bring this out. Ensure that everyone agrees on a common flowchart that captures every step in detail. From the mechanism of reaching out to a consumer for the first time, through all the engagement mechanisms, right down to extending the chain beyond him, everything should be plotted out for all to see.

Once the model is designed and ready, step back and ask yourself just one question: Will the consumer feel something?

I run a pretty unconventional process. But this step really trips up most participants. Narrowing it down to one single emotion, in another human being, is a complex task. It is further complicated for the mobile-first audience. A lot of senior marketers and researchers often misread this audience, possibly because of the age gap between them. The ease with which these young people go about studying, working and living their lives creates some skewed notions for observers and researchers from previous generations.

In the event of the project team becoming biased at this step, it helps to move away from the audience and focus instead on their motivations. Motivations provide a shield of neutrality and allow the team to focus on solving the problem at hand. In either case, the consumer’s response to the stimulus should be an emotional one. Most mobile marketing campaigns are designed to elicit a certain response. Sometimes, it is a simple click on a banner, sometimes it is to capture information and personal details, and other times it is to ensure that consumers buy from us. All the mechanics of such projects are steeped in rational arguments.

The first answer to that question is often a rational argument, wherein the team explains how we reach that emotion. This is often a trap, since rational arguments are not the end game. The answer often lies in a creative solution that short circuits the rational loop. The creative solution could be an ad creative or a copy text or any other piece of communication that creates the required aura around the project.

Once you reach this stage, you should pause. Everything that you could have done on paper is done. Now is the time to press the button and take the project live.

Some of you might have noticed that I have not discussed mobile-specific technology capabilities. No mention of banner formats, QR codes, rich media banners, video loops, embeds and the endless jargon associated with this domain. The simple reason is that all of this was not relevant in the first five steps. Marketing alone needs to find answers for the earlier steps. Now that you are clear on what to achieve and how, you can on-board partners with specific execution capabilities.

Many marketers take their campaigns live and then hand over the controls to the agency. I think the habit comes from mass media, where there isn’t much to do once it has gone live. On the mobile turf, it’s very different. There are variances and spurts and learnings everywhere.

The team should run the campaign, a little like the NASA command centre. You don’t go home once you launch the rocket. You go home only when it comes back safe and sound.

Hold on. It isn’t over just yet. The fact that you and your team have created a new project from scratch is surely worth celebrating. But it is also worth replicating. It’s funny that everyone gets excited by new and innovative things in business, yet most of the success comes from repeating some good habits, over and over again.

Marketers are in the business of changing habits. But often we ourselves face huge barriers to altering our own habits. This project roadmap has hopefully allowed you to realize the potential of effective mobile marketing in your business. Now it is time to convert that into a winning habit. And here is how to do it. Charles Duhigg, in his groundbreaking book ‘The Power of Habit’ ³ talks about the ‘habit loop’ — a mechanism of creating Cues followed by a Routine, followed by a Reward (see Figure 2).

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Cueing up the Rewards

This process deliberately includes habit building as a seventh step not outside of the primary process. It is aimed at creating the Cue and then sharing a possible Routine. The Rewards will be different for different people and must be discovered individually. With the current growth in mobile audience numbers and the progress in technology, new possibilities provide Cues every day. Marketers who create Routines for themselves and their teams to tap into these Cues will make themselves eligible for bigger business Rewards.

As I end this piece, I hope it gives you enough material to try out a project yourself, before the market makes it a mandatory part of your skill set. Do go forth and explore, while I go back to watching my son. He is a lot older now, but he is still teaching me so much. By the way, did you figure out which emotion allowed me to share this with you?