Connected Customer

Around a million new mobile subscribers are brought online in India alone every month. With those new subscribers comes a similar explosion in mobile bandwidth. “Mobile and wireless services are rapidly transforming from ‘poor man’s connectivity’ with data rates well below those for fixed services to comparable in speed and quality to their fixed-line counterparts. By some projections, mobile broadband services will overtake fixed broadband services as early as 2010,” writes Johna Till Johnson.

The revolution is not limited to mobile broadband, however. Take WiMax for example. WiMax enables a wireless signal to broadcast over a 10-mile radius. These new networks, and their corresponding devices and applications, are vastly increasing the reach of mobile connectivity.

Addressing Network World magazine’s IT audience, Johnson writes that these changes mean, “executives need to stop thinking of wireless and mobile technologies as a niche — relevant for a subset of users, but a footnote in the organization’s overall strategy. Instead, they should assume that mobile connectivity will become an increasingly important piece of the technology roadmap, and plan and budget for it accordingly.”

The same could be said for mobile marketers. Better bandwidth and a larger audience open the door to new, more innovative and increasingly interactive strategies and tactics. Ultimately, any effort to leverage technology upgrades to benefit mobile marketing strategies and tactics is predicated upon an understanding of the consumer’s product desires and mobile device expectations.

Michael Becker and Michael Hanley call this consumer, the “Connected Customer.” They write that “Marketers need to better understand the Connected Customer and what Connected Customers find relevant, informative and entertaining, and how the mobile channel and the practice of mobile marketing can help them accomplish their goals.”

Research surely will be important. The challenge will be to both determine those strategies and tactics which can be transferred from the web to the higher-bandwidth mobile marketing efforts, and to invent those strategies and tactics which will emerge from the new wireless and mobile capabilities.