Don’t let mobile paralyse your digital experience

We are all amazed by new devices and even prod­ucts class­es that are enter­ing mobile week by week. With this come new screen sizes and inter­ac­tion pat­terns that will prob­a­bly influ­ence how our tar­get cus­tomer finds yet anoth­er way in his dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence to demand inter­ac­tion with us as a business.

We don’t even have time to fear the paral­y­sis from analysing and adapt­ing our plans to new con­sumer trends in mobile. Also new APIs and SDKs by the plat­form ven­dors re-shape the ecosys­tem or even turn it upside-down. Big brands are chal­lenged by entrants that don’t yet car­ry the bag­gage of cash­flow from a work­ing and deeply inte­grat­ed busi­ness process­es. But leav­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to them to take a lead­ing role with a real mobile busi­ness is becom­ing increas­ing­ly risky for every brand, espe­cial­ly for those that have the chance to take advan­tage of the pri­ma­ry mobile dri­ver: phys­i­cal presence.

Those that did already restruc­ture their teams into small agile and ful­ly respon­si­ble teams, to own par­tic­u­lar por­tions of the dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence and are respon­si­ble opti­mize this across any chan­nel have an great advan­tage. But let me sug­gest an idea to those that didn’t make this tran­si­tion (yet): try to bridge phys­i­cal into the dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence (and back) with some­thing addi­tion­al, maybe just a cam­paign. You can learn a lot and mobi­lize your busi­ness, just make sure this project doesn’t cre­ate a new mobile silo.

Build­ing an App or using a new mobile ser­vice API might be chal­leng­ing for a start, but the real goal is to fig­ure out a great way to build an inte­grat­ed dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence across touch points that lever­age your main assets, e.g. phys­i­cal presence.

Final­ly make sure that you are not mea­sur­ing suc­cess on leads or rev­enue only, but rather on learn­ings for your busi­ness and knowl­edge trans­fer. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills will be required.

That said, man­age your expec­ta­tions. As For­rester pre­dicts; the mobile con­sumer will stay ahead for the fore­see­able future and enter­pris­es will not catch up any­time soon.

You can find more advice and mobile trends in Forrester’s “Pre­dic­tions 2014: Mobile Trends For Marketers”