Conquering the Wireless World: The Age of M‐Commerce

Citation

Steinbock, D. (2003), "Conquering the Wireless World: The Age of M‐Commerce", info, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 73-75. https://doi.org/10.1108/info.2003.5.3.73.8

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, the legendary founding director of the MIT Media Lab, published Being Digital (New York: Random House). Nowhere in that wonderful little manifesto of the digital revolution is mobile or wireless mentioned. In the United States, being digital, for years now, has been synonymous with a fixed line. Bits are bits, as Negroponte declares, but some bits are stationary and others travel. Markets want both.

For years, Microsoft’s corporate credo was reflected in its mission statement: “A computer on every desk and in every home.” In the era of IBM mainframes, that was visionary and bold. Today it is passé. Several years ago, Jorma Ollila, CEO and chairman of Nokia, popularized the new credo “A computer in every pocket.” A few years thereafter, Microsoft amended its statement to “empower people through great software, anytime, any place on any device.” Being digital is out, being mobile is in. On November 21, 2002, when The Economist released its story on “Computing’s new shape,” the cover page featured a Nokia phone, not a Microsoft pocket PC.

As the struggle for the mobile marketspace is now entering a new stage with the confrontation of the mobile leaders and IT giants, the IT players, such as Microsoft and Intel, have had to adjust their mission to the mobile, not the other way around. In this struggle to build and develop new customers and client relationships, the marketers are playing the central role.

In the not‐so‐distant past, one of the few available and useful introductions to marketing and wireless communications was Robert Steuernagel’s Wireless Marketing. Whether the reader was in marketing and sales or a service engineer, working for cellular carriers or other wireless phone services, he or she obtained fairly practical, non‐technical advice on the rapidly expanding mobile market. Of course, the book was priced accordingly.

Fast forward to the boom years of the “mobile Internet,” the “Wireless Web,” the “3G World” – in brief, the presumed post‐Internet El Dorado – and a new cottage industry evolved. In hindsight, these books filled the shelves at precisely the wrong time. As they bespoke of manna from heaven, the dotcom and mobcom valuations busted, the industry stumbled with 3G license auctions, and the wireless revolution crashed accordingly. Perhaps today, as the ethos of the “twin drivers” of mobility and the Internet are taken with a grain of salt, it is possible to take a more realistic look at what these works offer for marketing professionals, including industry practitioners, academic researchers and general readers.

Frederick Newell and Katherine Newell Lemon were among the first to outline the changing rules of personalized customer relationship management in the digital age. In Wireless Rules, they seek to offer the first comprehensive guide to the new mobile world. Their mission is to outline a state‐of‐the‐art, customer‐centric approach to wireless marketing for both B2B and B2C enterprise. Focusing on the customer relationship inherent in wireless marketing, the authors present wireless methods to develop customer loyalty, case studies of permission marketing and data mining tools, and tips for creating individualized, real‐time marketing messages. Their book is on customer relationship management (CRM) gone mobile.

In The Freedom Economy, Peter G.W. Keen and Ron Mackintosh portray the “mCommerce edge in the Era of the Wireless Internet.” Just as personal computers and the Internet have changed the landscape of ecommerce, the authors argue, mCommerce will continue to extend the way organizations conduct business, while changing the relationships between companies, customers, suppliers, and partners. To them, mobility means freedom, which creates choice and, thereby, value. With case studies and hands‐on advice, the book outlines the key areas for expanding value through mCommerce: customer relationships, logistics, and knowledge mobilization, or intellectual capital. The foreword is written by Mikko Heikkonen, Executive VP of Nokia Networks, who presents the book as a study of the “demand side” of the emerging mobile business.

Conquering the Wireless World is sold with Philip Kotler’s promise, “Doug Lamont deserves credit for writing the best book that I have seen about the trillion dollar m‐commerce wager.” Perhaps the traditional marketing approach accounts for the marketing guru’s excitement. Subtitled The Age of M‐Commerce, Lamont’s guide is predicated on value creation and delivery. With value creation, he focuses on marketing, promoting, and pricing wireless products and services. With value delivery, he explains how to segment international markets and target national markets, as well as position local goods and services. Lamont starts by determining the customer needs that are driving m‐commerce and explores in depth some marketing strategies. His key target groups comprise early adopters, including teenagers (or Net Gen), young adults (Gen X), and their parents, the younger baby boomers.

According to Ravi Kalakota and Marcia Robinson, the mobile Internet is transforming employee, supply chain, and customer interaction, and providing new innovation, cost‐reduction, and revenue opportunities. Their M‐Business shows how to reposition and develop business processes and enterprise applications to take full advantage of the mobile business wave that is portrayed as compelling and complex, even if its value is needlessly inflated (“and overtaking your organization even as you read these words)”. The gurus of IT‐driven e‐commerce business guides explore wireless revolution from a business perspective. They introduce strategies that can be exploited to adapt from tethered, PC‐centric models to mobile, person‐centric techniques and strategies. Claiming to focus on the bottom line, the authors explain how senior and financial managers can plan for and differentiate m‐business investments.

In Marketing without Wires, digital marketing expert Kim Bayne offers practical advice and observations about creating a well‐executed wireless marketing program. Drawing the line between the major differences and similarities with wired and wireless marketing tools, she explains how to leverage them for optimum advantage. The examples are detailed with case studies. In particular, Bayne shows how to develop strategies for delivering wireless content that will appeal to mobile customers; research and create a surefire wireless marketing program; link offline and online programs to create a comprehensive integrated marketing presence; and uncover new advancements and strategic initiatives to attract tech‐savvy consumers. A companion Web site features helpful resources, articles, and case study updates on new developments in wireless marketing.

In Beyond Mobile, a trio of Kairos Futures’ consultants (Mats Lindgren, Jörgen Jedbratt, and Erika Svensson) take the mobilization of many businesses and organizations as a given. They focus on the human aspects of mobile technology, exploring the ways that people will work and communicate in the mobile marketplace. Their bold future scenarios extend to the year 2007.

In the United States, marketers have now spent almost a decade trying to incorporate a digital Internet‐driven mindset into their organizational capabilities. In a recent effort to tailor a truly new approach, Philip Kotler and his colleagues have argued that as markets are changing more rapidly than marketing:

the classic marketing model needs to be future‐fitted. Marketing must be deconstructed, redefined, and stretched. Marketing is not going to work if its only charge is to pump up the sales of existing goods, i.e. traditional make‐and‐sell marketing. Marketers need to get more involved in deciding what goods to pump out. Smart firms are adopting a sense‐and‐respond marketing mind‐set (Kotler et al., 2002, pp. ix‐xi).

By looking at the cutting‐edge experiences of the mobcom pioneers and their early‐adopter clients, marketers might avoid the fate of yesterday’s Net investors. However, they must find ways to combine traditional marketing approaches with rapid‐response marketing relationships. In fact, the long march has barely begun. Wireless pioneers and trade association founders are only now completing the rules of the game in the mobile marketspace. In other words, they may well be where Internet marketers were sometime after the mid‐1990s.

Interestingly enough, US‐based marketers, the creators of mass marketing and brand building, may well prove to be laggards in this effort. As digital convergence is driving both Europe‐based mobile leaders and US‐based IT leaders, mobility‐driven marketing models are being pioneered in Nordic cities, such as Helsinki, Oulu, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, as well as in NTT DoCoMo’s Japanese empire (not in the United States (see Steinbock, 2001; 2002).

For the first time in the US dominated technology sector, an entire new infrastructure has been innovated outside the United States. Unsurprisingly, the pioneering diffusion, too, is first taking off in the core clusters of Finland and Sweden, as well as Japan, Korea, and China, and only later coming to the United States.