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From the CMO's Perspective, Mobile Should Equal Useful

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This article is by Josh Bernoff, senior VP, Idea Development, at Forrester Research. He is the co-author of the new book, The Mobile Mind Shift.

“Hello, customer. I’m from the company’s marketing department, and I’m here to help you.”

That’s something you don’t hear very often. Customers expect marketers to try to sell them something. Marketers concentrate on brand and image. And that’s fine.

But in a world that’s adopting mobile technology at an amazing pace – the overwhelming majority of phones sold in the US are now smartphones, and the number of smartphones globally is well over one billion – it’s time to think a little differently.

Smartphone owners have learned that their phone is an answer machine. It tells you where you are and where you’re going, whether the product you’re looking at on the shelf is cheaper at another store, and whether that sub sandwich is going to put you over your calorie budget. It helps you. Marketing and selling in that environment is as out of place as a giraffe at the South Pole. It just doesn’t fit.

You’ve probably heard of utility marketing, what the author Jay Baer calls “marketing that is so useful, people would pay for it.” If you’re going to fit in with what’s going on on the phone, you’re going to have to be useful.

Let’s look at some people who do this well.

Starbucks’ app doesn’t sell. It provides “pick of the week” music downloads to keep you entertained while you’re waiting in line. It becomes your payment card, allowing you to pay by showing a barcode on your phone. It tells you how to find the nearest Starbucks if you’re in an unfamiliar city. Alex Wheeler, in charge of global digital marketing at Starbucks, describes her philosophy about customers this way: “It is about relationships, not marketing. Our brand is all about moments of connection. That is at the core of the brand.” When you think that way, you’re going to have to be useful.

At Columbia Sportswear, Jay Kerr created “What Knot To Do,” an app that helps you tie the right knot in any situation. (And since you might be on a peak in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t require a mobile internet connection to work.)

At Krispy Kreme, every store has a switch inside that turns on the neon “Hot Light” outside the store, indicating that hot doughnuts just came off the line. Krispy Kreme and its development partner, Barkley, connected that switch to the Internet. Now their “Hot Light” app pushes a notification to you when hot doughnuts come out of a store near you. Krispy Kreme CMO Dwayne Chambers dumped traditional media ads in favor of digital programs like the Hot Light app. After 450,000 downloads and double-digit increases in same store sales, his philosophy appears to be working.

Here’s how to take the lessons of Starbucks, Columbia Sportswear, and Krispy Kreme and apply them to your business:

Start with your customer and her journey. Figure out what her real problem is (like the Columbia Sportswear customer who needs to tie knots) and how mobile could help. We call these points where mobile solves problems “mobile moments,” and they’re very well suited to customers trained to get answers from their phones in an instant.

Then line up all these moments and evaluate them on two scales. First, are they beneficial to the customer? Second, are they valuable to your company?

The moments that are valuable to both are the place to start. Whether you’re Stanley tools making it easy to use your phone as a level, Johnson & Johnson showing how to use its products in a baby’s sleep routine, or Krispy Kreme pointing out when hot doughnuts are ready, these are the mobile features to pursue first.

Krispy Kreme 10 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Avoid the features that benefit you more than your customer – the customer will ignore them anyway. And the ones that benefit your customer more than you? Add a little twist to connect to your business, so they work for you, too.

As these sorts of mobile utility become common, people will get used to their brands stepping up to help them. And “I’m from marketing and I’m here to help you” might not seem like such a strange thing to say after all.