In this week's issue of Marketing News, Lightspeed Research released a really interesting study on Americans' usage and attitude towards mobile phones and mobile phone marketing. The study of close to 1200 US consumers shows 54% of smartphone owners say they have downloaded a mobile app in the last 6 months. And over 40% say they access the internet at least once per day. 
The fact is consumers are using mobile devices for so much more we ever imagined and in a wider array of both functional and mindless ways. Open up Shazam and you can identify and buy the song you are listening on the radio on your Blackberry or iPhone. Scan the bar code at Target and see if you can get a better deal somewhere else. Apple (and now Droid) got it right when they said "there's an app for that". Just like we are now "trained" to turn to the internet for information, we are not far from regularly turning to our phone to do the same.
As mobile devices change consumer behaviors and expectations, more and more businesses are tapping into this marketing opportunity and connecting with customers to provide a better service experience and the convenience mobile technology offers.
Along with retail/e-commerce, banking has been one of the most affected industries that we serve. Jim Garrity, CMB's managing director of our financial practice, just wrote a fantastic article in the May issue of ABA Bank Marketing that talks about how smaller regional banks are using mobile apps like ATM locators to better serve their customers and better compete with the big guys. It used to be the larger banks had the competitive advantage because of the sheer convenience their vast ATM networks offered.
Smaller community banks then joined larger ATM networks to better compete by offering more ATM's in more locations, but customers often could not find them or could not easily identify which ATMS were in their network. Now smaller community banks are using mobile technology to help customers find ATM's in their network all from the convenience of their mobile device. Good examples are MyATM and Allpoint's mobile app called Go-Everywhere which helps customers find over 37,000 surcharge-free ATMs.
Using mobile apps has leveled the playing field and allows the community banks to better compete and requires bigger banks to respect their smaller competitors. Read more of Jim's article ATM Locators: Your Lead-in To Full Mobile in the May issue of ABA Bank Marketing.
Where is your opportunity in the mobile market? Surely "there's an app for that"!
Also, check out Josh Mendelsohn's post 1 Topic, 5 Blogs: Mobile Surveys in Market Research to read more about using mobile technology as a research tool.
Posted by Kristen Garvey. Kristen is CMB's Director of Communications, a mother of two, and loves mobile technology.
1,700 of us converged in Vegas at IIR's Prepaid Conference in February to talk about this new frontier business, "pre-paid"(think about it as your money (you know, debit) available to you anytime, anywhere).
We used to think of prepaid simply as a prepaid debit card but now the prepaid world is converging with the mobile applications world and a magical thing is happening...in the near future you may not need your wallet anymore, because your phone is holding everything, including your money. Some of the smartest frontiersmen and women from the Fortune 500 spoke, presented, mingled and shared thoughts about the world of tomorrow.
When one thinks of the staggering estimate of 70,000,000 people who are ‘unbanked' or ‘under banked,' that is, living paycheck to paycheck, overdrawing their bank accounts to steep fees (if they still have an account), sometimes using pawn shops, payday loans and other financial instruments that come with steep fees, the prepaid world is asking: Why couldn't life be better for these people? Why couldn't the money just arrive on a card in their wallet on payday? Or better yet, why couldn't the money just zip over to their mobile phone?
And if they're transferring money to loved ones in foreign countries, why couldn't you send it via your phone and get a reply message back when the recipient actually receives the money (and what amount they actually received)? Why couldn't governments save millions of dollars by using pre-paid to reduce administrative burdens of check administration?
Many of the leaders in the prepaid industry attended and spoke at the conference. Some of the highlights:
- Brian Triplett, VISA talked about the broad opportunity to have better public/private relationships and partnerships. He got us all thinking about how we can better partner with government entities in a way to drive better value to the constituent base. He interviewed former President Bill Clinton as well. Together, they explored the central concept of infrastructure and ‘the old way of doing business' being a key constraint as well as how prepaid can transform the administrative burden for the healthcare industry, government payments (unemployment, social security, Medicare, jury duty, employees etc.).
- Alpesh Choksi, AmEx President Prepaid spoke about how he expects prepaid to transform the lives of people all over the world. He says that the economic crisis has helped with articulating financial security, safety and control which is exactly what prepaid provides. People are now connected to their money in new, non-traditional networks. New devices are being born every day and two-way devices such as phones now allow people to service differently... direct to consumer tailored marketing campaigns based on location etc. are really not at all far-fetched or constrained by budgets or tools anymore.
- Laura Kelly, SVP of Global Prepaid and Healthcare for MasterCard talked about prepaid as being ‘smarter, bigger, better.' These are not small splashes...Her "Smarter" stood for the innovation as evidenced by the Easy Link prepaid card in Singapore which is both a transit card AND a shopping card. Her "Bigger" is a walloping large payroll program launched by WalMart that saved 258,000 pounds of paper and gas for associates to drive to the store for their paycheck. Finally, her "Better" stood for better for the consumer. She used the example of social security prepaid cards that are now being used by nearly 900,000 people in this country to provide a more secure way of getting money directly to the people who need it without fear of checks disappearing from mailboxes.
- Farhan Ahmad, GM of Emerging Business at Discover talked about the need to get new innovative products to market in less than 6 months. No small feat for a large company. He and his team are considering mobile payments as an emerging solution that can fundamentally affect the infrastructure for the USA with "better, safer, more convenient access to people's money where/when they need it."
Segmentation Best Practices webinar
April 29th at Noon: Chadwick Martin Bailey's Brant Cruz will present best practices of market segmentation based on his years of experience he has as CMB's segmentation guru working with clients like eBay, Electronic Arts, Plantronics, and Microsoft.
Register here.
Learn more about the Prepaid Expo or watch some of what these leaders are talking about below.
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie is a Director on CMB's Financial Services, Healthcare, and Insurance Practice.
By Jim Garrity, Vice President
As the leader of our financial services practice, I travel a fair amount to client sites to deliver market research findings or discuss upcoming initiatives. Recently I've noticed something interesting (and a bit frustrating). It seems that with the past decade's run up in real estate prices that many of my clients have abandoned the city centers and moved to suburban campuses.
Okay, so what so frustrating about that you ask? Well, nothing really.
Except that I used to be able to get a cab at the airport and ask to be taken "downtown please, the Merrill Lynch building on Vesey." I now find myself asking to be taken to "suburb X, the Financial Plaza, specifically building 5 on Mega Conglomerate Avenue." It's not the 15 minute drive into the ‘burbs I mind, rather it's the knowledge that where in the past I had no idea where my cabbie was going, I was certain he did. Now, I'm fairly certain that he has only the vaguest idea of where we are going. And what's worse, I can now use several iPhone apps to determine precisely how far off track he is...while simultaneously attempting to redirect him as he ignores me.
But why does he ignore me? Well first, he is supposed to be the expert, so he really seems to dislike getting directed by me, the customer. Second, in an attempt to be helpful, I am providing him with suburban landmarks that he is unfamiliar with (so maybe he has good reason to ignore me!). Third, while he doesn't have a GPS device, he does have a Bluetooth earpiece that allows him to obtain directions from his dispatcher. Well at least that's who I assume he's talking to, because he most certainly isn't responding to me anymore.
So what's the lesson here? I think it's something about understanding how technology has made the consumer more knowledgeable, more powerful, AND oftentimes more easily frustrated. And this frustration occurs most frequently when the consumer and company are working off of two different knowledge platforms. In financial services this means bankers and advisors need to know their stuff, obviously...but that simply isn't good enough anymore. They also need to know what their clients know, and know WHERE their clients obtained this information, in order to have a truly productive interaction.
So how has the proliferation of information impacted your business, your client relationships, your training programs? What are you doing to ensure that your customers' knowledge doesn't turn into customer frustration?
Jim Garrity is our VP of Financial Services, never wears blue jeans to work, and knows exactly how to get to his home in the suburbs.