Please contact me at my NEW blog address:

www.theimpulseeconomy.com

How mobile enhances packaging and point of sale at retail

See article: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/how-mobile-enhances-packaging-and-point-of-sale-at-retail/

A modern-day grocery or pharmacy is not a friendly zone for the brand. Gone are the halcyon days of “Leave-it-to-Beaver” when brands worked hand-in-hand with the local store owner to sell stuff. Now many retail chains compete on the shelf with competitive generic brands.

The brand’s product and the retail aisle have been in an adversarial relationship for quite some time. The product sits on the shelf presumptuously hoping for the consumer to recall their catchy jingle, celeb ambassador, or signature packaging with little to no help from the retailer.

Indeed, $20 billion is spent on cardboard and plastic to create end-of-aisle CPG displays. The niche vertical is “contact packaging” and is made up of approximately 2,000 small companies across the United States. Their sole mission in life is making your product “pop” in the store and driving more sales. They are the bling of retail.

Money spent on end-of-aisle display in retail stores is set to grow to $50 billion over the next few years because manufacturers are behind the eight ball. This is mainly in the grocery, pharmaceutical, games, electronics and hardware verticals.

How can these brands engage the customer and drive sales more effectively without the cost of cardboard, plastic and detailing?

How Haiti changed mobile forever

Read more here: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/5135.html

While media companies discuss mobile applications and other leading-edge ways to engage the consumer, the reality of what we debate and what actually works are often two different things.

Historically, mobile business has been driven by unassuming but universally adopted communication services such as SMS. Haiti and the American Red Cross underscore this.

Seven Point RETAIL Checklist for MOBILE

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/how-retailers-can-develop-an-effective-mobile-channel/

Here is an elementary seven-point checklist that mobile campaign managers may want to reference as they build out and manage their mobile channel:

Leverage existing consumer behavior
How many conference panels have I attended where the line following, “This is the year of mobile,” is: “We just need to educate the consumer”? It is pure hubris to say that you will “educate” the user who is far more advanced intuitively then a pack of marauding mobile experts.

Consumers are using their phone for mobile Web and SMS seamlessly throughout their day in our stores, hotels and at events.

Our humble goal is just try to keep up and capture a small piece of their conversation. They are way ahead of any marketing department.

Leverage the largest mobile install base
If education is not the word of the day, then try to forget anything that looks like a shiny object or new-fangled solution. (Even if there are 100,000 of them on a mobile storefront somewhere.)

If consumers are using SMS and the mobile Web as their main channels, then use them. When you think you should walk before you run, start at a crawl.

• Build your SMS opt-in community.
• Buy some mobile advertising inventory
• Use both to drive conversion solutions

Reach and frequency are the two words that you need to continually use in the same sentence as mobile advertising and marketing.

Leverage existing promotions and CRM strategies.
Your IT folks will tell you this but I will remind you: mobile should be an extension of business-as-usual in the store, street or office.

Use mobile application programming interfaces (APIs) and tie them into your existing communication services and databases. Email, IVR, SMS and MMS should all be fluid two-way opt-in channels.

Keep it very, very simple
Seems like an also-ran statement but somewhere between concept and launch many mobile solution providers lose their simplicity gene.

The mobile consumer is on the run: you need one “click2engage,” one “click2commerce” and one “click2bricks&mortar.”

Add one step and you have lost your consumer.

Make it an intimate, personal, one-to-one channel
Cliché, but if you forget and build your service incorrectly, you will dramatically lose your hard-earned opt-in.

While SMS has a nearly 100 percent open-rate – buzz-to-view time will amaze the most-jaded chief marketing officer – SMS also has an equally high opt-out rate if the viewed message is not what the subscriber expected.

The SMS channel is digital gold. Consumers are now including you alongside their personal messages. You need to make a commitment to be as targeted and contextual as possible.

Make it a “Trojan” channel
Allow your consumer to reach you directly for product and service information. In a world where you know more about your brand than the in-store sales person, allow consumers to surreptitiously search, surf, text that product directly and learn why they need to buy it – now.

Just as the New Balance brand allows the customer to text their new shoes and walks them through a custom in-store experience, every product can be the in-aisle expert guiding the potential consumer reviews, insights and tips.

Additionally, allow the consumer to use this channel to post reviews, insights and tips to you. Use it for pop-surveys to gauge just-in-time feedback.

Make it horizontal
Mobile is a perfect medium to add to your existing media touch points.

In a world where most of the media plan is bought as vertical push media, mobile is often pull. It allows the consumer to text and get information, rewards and incentives off out-of-home, television, radio, print and other non-interactive media.

Do not manage your mobile channel in isolation.

THERE ARE many more things to add to this list, but if you get this far, you will join the members-only A-list of “mobile experts” and have the hubris of authoring your own list.

Mobile: Bundled not Bought

With the Google Admob rumpus of 2009, we all are looking to the positive fallout in 2010. Maybe it would be over simplistic or apologetic to say that up until the $750M drop we were all just building network and waiting. Now, we need to drive up the CPMs.

How do we go about this? With many publishers bundling the mobile buy for “free” with a more robust online commitment, it is difficult to explain to the buyer the unique and powerful value of the mobile CPM.

Speak to any planner and they will tell you the following things about mobile inventory buying:
• For a small wedge of the digital buy, it is “mighty hard to buy”
• The CPM “seems too high for the value add”
• To drive an integrated buy with post-click strategy, there are “too many moving parts.”

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has work hard to demystify the buy by publishing a Mobile Buyer Guide, which holds the media planner hand as they extend their digital buy to mobile. However, no guide will drive significant dollars into mobile until the mobile buy is not an also-ran to the online buy and commands a respectable CPM in its own right.

http://www.gomonews.com/mobile-bundled-not-bought

Growth of mobile commerce inevitable in 2010

“In nine years of agency pizza lunches, industry panels and client presentations, the pitch was always mobile engagement,” said Gary Schwartz, president of Impact Mobile. “For every pizza slice they ate we made them listen to the mantra: ‘Mobile can activate your traditional media. Run a mobile campaign.’

“With the recession exiting, companies that for years branded themselves as “mobile marketing agencies” or “mobile marketing technology shops” have suddenly rebranded their wares as mobile commerce,” he said. “The focus has become close-loop programs that can end in some form of conversion. Suddenly we are talking about transaction and point-of-sale.

“The market has matured (God bless it) into acquisition and conversion: discover the mobile customer, do something with them that will end in a transaction of some kind: Point-of-sale integration, m-commerce, on-board credit chips, m-couponing, PIN-on-receipt.”

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/growth-of-mobile-commerce-inevitable-in-2010/

What Are the Top Retail Trends for 2010?

RTP Surveys 10 Of The Industry’s Top Analysts In The Outlook Guide

With the year coming a close, Retail TouchPoints called on some of the most prominent retail experts to compile an expanded resource for retailers that includes rich insight on the most telling retail trends for 2010. From inventory and pricing management to mobile marketing, the 2010 Retail TouchPoints Outlook Guide offers insight for every vertical, exposing some of the biggest challenges and more importantly, solutions to optimize customer interactions and advisement on where to increase marketing dollars in 2010.

http://www.retailtouchpoints.com/component/content/article/378-what-will-be-the-top-trends-in-2010-rtp-surveys-10-of-the-industrys-top-analysts-in-the-outlook-guide.html