Time to get a bit philosophical about the whole mobile thing. It must be the sun and the early signs of spring here in Provence on my mini-holiday that inspire me to this thinking.

Norman Lewis of Wireless Grids asked this brilliant question in the header – Why do we make phone calls? He wants us to look at the social meaning of communication, not only the function. I guess we can say it is a fancy way of saying that the experience is what counts. But it is interesting to put this in the framework of business models as well. We need to have business models that match this view of the social meaning of comminication, the models need to extend beyond the communication instance itself. In one sense flat fee monthly recurring billing is one model that fits this quite well. At least it is a transparent way. At times maybe a bit blunt for the real valuation of each instance when I use a service. Still, it gives you as a consumer the ability to make an active choice – “does this service give me an experience that I think is worth at least what I pay each month for it?”. 

At the core of this thinking is of course the reason why we all have a phone – to communicate with others. The killer app is voice, then comes text. All the other things in the so called mobile internet (hey, why do we say that? It’s the same internet accessed by a mobile device, anyway where was I?) are having a tough time to compete. Historically it has been on the grounds of technical complexity. It has been far too difficult to do anything else than placing a call on a mobile phone. Then when you managed to surf to a mobile site, it turned out you got robbed when you used mobile data. But that has changed. We are not in an all that bad shape today. It is easier and cheaper (often at fixed cost. I am a friend of transparency as you can see) to use the phone for apps and browsing. There are numerous improvements to be made, but we are going the right direction at an accelerated speed.

Back to the question, why do we make phone calls? For all of us developing expereinces for the mobile – be it a mobile marketing campaign, a corporate mobile site, a new community or a casual game – think why would someone use this service? What is the value here? Hear me out, I know you are going “Duhh!!” now. But let’s be honest, when we work in an industry where the legacy mindset has been to market technologies and slap on applications just because they are technically possible to deliver, we should be a bit humble here.

I’ll end with a bow to Seth Godin who recently had a good post on marketing and product development and which comes first. Basically he states that all good products start with great marketing thinking first – then you build the product/service.

So here’s your homework. In no more than half a page asnwer this question about a project you are working on right now: “Why would someone find this new mobile service valuable and worthwhile their time and money?”.