Mobile travels at the speed of light
The mobile market is currently characterised by developments and changes at a pace never seen before. Despite the success of the iPhone and iPad, there is still strong fragmentation. At the same time, thanks to the potentials of unfiltered feedback on channels such as Apple’s App Store, your customers are only one click away from your brand and the commercial success of your product.
Now the good news. This situation offers completely new opportunities for marketing and brand dedication – provided you understand the market and know how to make use of those new opportunities for you and your brand. There are a few things you should know about the mobile market.
Flash is dead
How many contacts did your last Flash campaign generate and on how many mobile end devices did it run?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: Flash is dead.
The reasons for that are well-known and can’t simply be dismissed as a mere image campaign in Apple’s battle for global supremacy in the mobile end device market. Flash consumes an unbelievable amount of resources and runs at different speeds on end devices with different processor power. Both absolute showstoppers. Unacceptable for a high-quality and consistent presentation of your brand in a global premium market characterised by a wide variety of end devices that have only one thing in common: limited memory.
To reinforce all this, Apple has just defined the coming standard for mobile campaigns with iAds. iAds get by completely without Flash, do not require opening an external browser, and run on the open standard HTML 5.0.
Apple’s supremacy
Is it possible to do anything in the mobile market without Apple? As a developer of high-quality mobile games, Fishlabs gives thanks every day for Apple, but the iPhone and iPad are now no more and no less than the lowest common denominator. The iPhone has been unable to show a growth in market share for two successive quarters and is in a saturation phase with a smartphone market share of 25 percent.
In the same period, both Android and NOKIA have grown by 10 percent. The reason is NOKIA’s undisputed strong position and growth in the emerging markets beyond the G7 and the elite phenomenon of the iPhone. There, NOKIA dominates with market shares averaging 70 percent.
Those are facts you must take into account when planning your next mobile campaign.
The future
Should you continue to rely on the iPhone in the future? The answer is that it depends on where your want to be present. In the G7 countries, the answer is yes, but only if your future iPhone production is qualitatively on the same level as a TV spot. The competition is tough, and innovation and quality are more than ever the only way to assert your own brand in the long term. Once again, in the App Store, your customers are only one click away from your brand and the commercial success of your product.
If you focus on the US market, the situation is different. There, you should base your strategy on both the iPhone and Android. There is no change in quality standards.
The situation is again different for a brand that wants to be present in the US market and the other G7 countries as well as in the global emerging markets. In such a case it will no longer be possible to get by without a strategic mix of the iPhone, NOKIA, and Android – and with budgets that compete with TV productions or even overshadow them in the future.