Opportunity to Put Interaction in the Hands of 5 Billion Global Mobile Consumers
Mobile on the Move
The mobile phone represents the most pervasive channel of communications and targeted engagement on the planet, with more than 5 billion users globally. As smart phones already account for more than 30 percent of the market, users are rapidly migrating to smarter devices and increasingly utilizing their phones for social media engagement. There will be some 800 million users of mobile social networking worldwide by 2012, according to eMarketer.
The mobile channel is an unprecedented opportunity to reach both developed consumer markets in new an intrusive way, and developing regions that cater to a previously untapped, unreachable, and unbanked mass of humanity. An estimated 2.5 billion adults (more than half of the world’s adult population) do not use any form of formal financial services, yet about 70 percent of all people on the planet use a cell phone.
?Unrestricted Reach
In the developed world, today’s consumer is bombarded with more communications through a broader range of channels than ever before. We’ve reached the stage of information overload and message burnout in which consumers are ditching traditional, untargeted, unsustainable “spray and pray” means of marketing in favor of delivery forms that are more personalized, immediate, relevant, and environmentally responsible. Today’s power of a text or a tweet has replaced the days of direct mail dominance or email explosion. Both marketers and consumers are beckoning for new digital, mobile touch points that can bring individualized value to billions of readers, responders, and recurring shoppers. Some 44 percent of consumers would rather receive product information and marketing messages through SMS than any other channel, and nearly three quarters of marketers prefer the text message as a marketing vehicle, according to Forrester Research.
In developing countries, marketers face the opposite phenomenon in which much of the world’s potential shoppers and decision makers heretofore have had no avenue of access. Without any documented address, bank account, landline, IP address, or other point of contact, they have been impossible to identify, profile, segment, and monetize. Yet with this population in particular, the mobile phone craze has firmly taken hold. In India, more than 20 million cell phone accounts are opened every month, accounting for nearly 600 million mobile users in that country alone. African cell phone use increased six fold between 1999 and 2008, and A GSMA and Deloitte study estimates that an increase of 10 percent in mobile penetration can increase the annual GDP growth rate up to 1.2 percent in a developing country. This powerful, proliferating mobile force has the potential to unleash new levels of commerce and economic growth in remote regions of the world.