• 62% do not yet view their mobile device as an extension of their computer.
• Only 23% feel that they have more or the same level of control over their mobile device as they have over their computer.
• 70% have never downloaded an application to their mobile device.
• 67% want to be able to choose their mobile applications for themselves, rather than have their carriers choose for them.

So basically the consumer says: I know what I want, let me choose and make it much easier to use and earn the trust for me to spend time and money with you/your service.

Trust is a big thing here. The carriers have been shocking numerous consumers with data charges, content providers off-deck have been ripping off customers with unstoppable subscriptions schemes etc. This is changing to the better though. We are getting transparency in pricing and the scamsters are being reigned in. 

The play book going forward must be to offer choice, easy access and most of all “it”, the x-factor for the specific target groups. What can this service/product do for me?, is the question the consumer wants answers to. Fast. In about 3 seconds on your site/deck/ad they need to get what’s in it for them. There is no recipe for this part. Here the gap in conversion can be huge. My experience is that rapid prototyping and adjust as you is what works best.

Currently I am involved in launching Souldate (site in Swedish), a new mobile dating service with localisation. We are adjusting and tweaking the service daily. We started off with pretty scary conversion numbers. A few workdays later we have improved them substantially. In this case will market the service in multiple channels. TV is about all we are not using. Customer registration is done in any of three channels – SMS, wap and web. This means we have to constantly evaluate to see what we should focus on.

But all this work with constant improvements are lost if the  hygiene factors trust and transparency are not in place. Here we all have to pull together to change, blow whistles and make sure we earn the trust of our customers. Without it we can pack up and go home.

Then you pick up the Economist and find the opposite view. In the article Boom in the Bust a rosier picture is painted. Slightly simplified; the wireless industry is thriving thanks to it changing structure. 

This is a painfully strong reminder that we should not listen blindly to projections from gurs and analysts. Do your own homework, ask your colleagues, partners and competitors and weigh it all up. Then make sure you run a tight ship so you can pay salaries and bills. Can you chip away a bit on the debt side as well maybe? Well this is not a post on how to manage a business in a recession. It is, as always, my five cents on the mobile web and content industry.

To me much of the data and facts at hand support the view that mobile communications has become a must-have commodity in most markets. In many cases mobile content is a low value purchase. Pricing and total cost of use is becoming more and more transparent. This all works to our favour. Consumers are not that inclined to stop using the mobile services they are used to and like.

On the handset side it is different of course. This is the higher cost item. Prior years race to upgrade phones technically and market it hard to get consumers to upgrade, has made the installed base of handsets pretty high end overall. You do not really need the newest phone to be able to get the most of your mobile life. What you have in your pocket today will do just fine in most cases. Here the handset manufacturer’s success has become their own enemy.

Upgrading your phone today is seen as a pure luxury purchase. Staying in touch, participating in communities, tweeting away as usual, is part of what many consumers are today – a “homo mobilis”. That behaviour will take longer to change. 

Ending note to self: Keep offering great services and invent the next services to delight existing and new users.

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?”.

For my own businesses though I find it much more useful to run a few off the charts what-if scenarios. Then you are ready when something whacky happens. So these days I think in terms of “so what if so and so happened out of the blue, what would we do? What would Superman do?”.

Here are my  five scenarios  to be prepared for in 2009. If you know what you would do if any of these things happened you are little better prepared than the rest of the pack.

1. Nokia looses the top positions in handsets to Android and open source OS based phones (and yes the iPhone as well of course).

Well, I consider Palm and maybe even Motorola already dead. Call me a cynic if you like. Even by picking Nokia this one is almost qualifying as an extrapolation of current events and maybe the least bold scenario. The real effect here would be increased competition in the mobile entertainment space. The reason being that it speeds up the convergence between “the two Internets” – the mobile and PC experienced internet. Since competitive advantage in our industry is based on skills in how to overcome the fragmentation in technologies and non-compatibilities. I.e. we have learnt how to tweak and short cut in an ecosystem that is very rudimentary no to say flawed. As the ecosystem improves and turns into a normal operating space as the Internet for PCs is already alot of our special mobile skills are worth nothing. Zero. Zilch. So make sure you can offer experiences that stand out when the user experience shoots up. Get the customer base to grow fast so you have a tribe of loyal followers.

2. Major mobile network operator goes bust.

Why not? There are some serious refinancing of debt needed this year among many MNO’s in Europe and North America. Will they manage to get through the year? We have heard abot cost cutting and staff reductions for the last three months now and I take it that we will hear more. When it comes to government bailouts, I truly hope there will be none if a telco knocked on the government’s door. There is a difference from saving a vital function in society (moving money around) from saving a company that makes less than it can produce the service for. Especially when there are eager competitors in every market that could provide the service without interruption (almost), should a player go bust. Implications? You might loose that lucrative MNO contract when your customer goes bust, and they might drag you down as well if they have large unpaid bills they owe you. This is more or less practice by the large operators to first of all have 90 days payment terms and then pay late on top of that. If you are in a growth situation with a MNO and your service/game sells really well and expands, the light in the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train. That revenue you booked might not materialise. Action: Clear up your accounts receiveable and get paid or pull the service. At least play hardball to let your customer understand that they must have mistaken you for a bank.

3. Research reports really prove that mobile phone radiation is a real health hazard.

No we are getting into the real earthquake-like scenarios. Say that the NIH or some other serious institution can prove that a) the radiation from phones and base stations are seriously altering human tissue and b) old research has been tampered with driven by commercial interests and some of the manufacturers’ CEOs will stand trial for this deception. Implication: Severe drop in mobile phone use. Fixed broadband explodes.

Fixed telephony revival. We start to plan our day again instead of “I’ll text you when I’m there” lifestyle we live today. Mobile phones with an airplane mode are still used for off-line things like playing games once downloaded or transferred from PC to phone. Action: Start a recycling business for mobile phones.

4. All mobile content becomes free before the advertisers are ready to pay for the advertising needed to fund the industry.

Back to a safer prediction maybe. We have seen alot of free ad-funded models for mobile in the last 6 months. In my business I have tested a few myself. It is defenitely a model that makes sense and will prevail. The problem is that we have been double-whacked here. The big advertisers were not convinced at the time when the financial crisis reached its climax in the autumn of 2008. So now there are sites, services and ad agencies chasing very few ad dollars for their things. Some had already made a 100% commitment to the consumers for a free service. Implication: In 2009 you can probably not run a profitable business on a free ad-funded model. Action: If you have the financial strength, optimise the business and hold on to the cash as much as you can. Evangelise the advertising world. Join up with ad-agencies and ad networks to to this. If you need to make a profit sooner rather than later to survive, add premium features, find banner swaps for no-cash customer acquisitions, Evangelise as mentioned above. Or, call it quits and start from scratch with the money you have left. Maybe a credit collection firm?

5. A major government is overthrown  by a grassroots movement using the mobile phone as primary tool.

If Obama could win an election with digital media as a large piece in the puzzle, why not do the opposite. Here I think of much of the developing world where we easily find a few governments that should go if the countries in question are to thrive. Common to these countries is that the penetration of mobile phones are far higher than PC internet access penetration. Implication: Revival of democracy and citizen engagement and empowerment to organise, debate and finally make their will heard. Action: Pick a country, go there and start building the service and team. Might not pay your mortgage today, but if you can live off your savings for a while you are in for something to talk to your grandchildren about. It is all about leaving the world a tiny bit better than you found it.

2009 is already a week old, are you prepared?!

Let me know what you think. But make those contingency plans first. Make up your own what-ifs and make sure you know how to act if they become reality.

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Image via Wikipedia

Russell at MobHappy is starting to gather input for his prediction for 2009. The start of the end of the mobile operator portal is my safe bet for these predictions. I would be surprised if there are any major MNO portals that operate the way they do today in two years time.

The second prediction is a condition for the first – mobile internet becomes a mass market product/behaviour. Not just mobile broadband for your laptop, but for the phone. People can now afford and manage the discovery issues to find what they really want with their mobile phone. They will not need to be guided by their operator in the discovery of the services, apps and destinations they want.

I will get a full set of my predictions out here in the coming days. It will be worth reading. Below you see some articles that are hinting at what I will include in my predictions for 2009.

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