Mobile Applications for Marketing

Marketing through mobile phones has been around for some time now. It mainly consisted of a means to send text messages (SMS) to the target, promoting a product or service or offering a discount when the message is shown at a retail outlet (these discount coupons are called m-coupons). What these mechanisms lack is a means to generate pull from the consumer, that is, an incentive for the consumer to actually search for special offers. In addition, most of these SMS marketing offerings lack subsequent analytics to determine efficacy of the marketing efforts. A service provided by a company called MobiMedia, in India, is the ultimate mobile marketing solution. The consumer is sent an SMS, clicks on a link to download an application that offers an attractive and easy-to-use means to pull m-coupons of interest. The coupons can be presented at a participating retailer where they can be redeemed. Companies using the service can set up their own marketing campaigns and throughout a campaign duration can track consumer actions relevant to the promotions and also generate valuable analytics.

Convergence of Visual Data & Mobile Solutions

Many mobile phones today have cameras and quite a few mobile entertainment applications exist, that invoke the camera facility. It is now the turn of mobile enterprise solutions to utilize the camera phone for business use. Applications can control the camera, capture a picture and then pass it along with other information to a central server for processing. All along, the picture is treated like another data item and thus catalogued in a database for easy retrieval later. Mobile photo applications are used by insurance claims inspectors for visually recording a vehicle’s condition, by marketing people to decide on how to place consumer products on retail shelves, by loan sales persons to capture documents; and the list can go on, encompassing any application where a visual record needs to be taken for processing. An innovative application I came across was one where barcodes on redemption vouchers are read, verified and accounted for immediately, with just an ordinary camera phone instead of an expensive portable barcode reader. It is just a matter of time that mobile photo applications will become common-place in the enterprise world.