The legendary marketing guru and blogging natural, Seth Godin, has been waxing about mobile in his nice spare style.
Seth’s take is that the reason mobile data hasn’t exploded is that mobile operators’ problem is that they’re “trying to solve the wrong problem”. And that we’re going to discover a whole bunch of stuff that people want on their mobile that we simply can’t envisage today.
He’s definitely looking at the market through “half empty” glasses - there’s an awful lot happening in mobile that is taking off and is exciting. But I agree with his analysis and have written much the same thing, many times before. Innovation and breakthrough won’t come from the operators and when it does, it tends to be badly marketed. Operators generally can be great brand marketers and very poor product/service ones. I wonder why? The two skills aren’t mutually incompatible, surely?
If I was Marketing Director of a big operator for the day, apart from sorting out their product/service marketing issues, I’d divert 10% - ok, sod it, let’s go for 20% - to grants, initiatives and competitions to stimulate innovation among the developer community and anyone else who could think up new ideas for products, applications and services for mobile phones. It wouldn’t matter if the entrants weren’t technical, as some budget would be earmarked to pay other developers to build these ideas.
Then I’d steal another 10% of the budget to seed these new products into heavy and influential mobile users and let them spread the word for me.
Then we’d see this stuff take off.
The likes of Verizon have a $1 billion + marketing budget and I guarantee that syphoning off some of that would be an awful lot more effective that commissioning another “my network’s better than your network” ad campaign.
The other way of stimulating innovation in the market is via an injection of investment from the ventures community. So far, The Valley, so long the source of innovation dollars has pretty much ignored mobile. But in recent months, that’s starting to change and I think we’re about to see a flood of money soaking into the market. That means it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur with a hot mobile idea ready to hit the market.
[tags] seth godin, verizon, the valley, marketing, innovation [/tags]
Another good way to get this going is if operators provided service providers a simple and inexpensive means for e-payments, including an infrastructure for handling that from Internet services. See NTT DoCoMo as the still best example of that. Those service providers that pay more get more visibility in the operators’ portals.
As you say, operators are not good at inventing services, so instead they should realise they are service enablers and WISPs, and let others provide a plethora of services where “Darwin” will determine what services have long term appeal.
There’s an odd market divide, where services like Flickr and others are free (for whatever reason) and operators don’t want to provide anything for free (for whatever reason). There’s an obvious business opportunity here if we can strike a balance between a fatalistic and a capitalistic mind-set.
The Problem with Mobile…
On this blog, Seth Godin asks himself “Why hasn’t the whole cell phone industry exploded?”. While Seth’s believes it is because "we’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.", that is not the true reason…
The problem is twofold - …
The Problem With Mobile?…
I think Seth Godin makes an interesting point here. The mobile industry today has many parallels to the online and wireline industries in the late 1990’s. You have millions of mobile subscribers using hand picked mobile sites and messaging services…
[...] Marketing Director for the Day at MobHappy » "Operators generally can be great brand marketers and very poor product/service ones. I wonder why? The two skills aren’t mutually incompatible, surely?" [...]