Mobile Marketing through Location Based Service
Debasis Chatterji
Chief Executive Officer
Netxcell Ltd.
India
Chatterji@netxcell.com
We, Netxcell, are not directly involved in pure play LBS business. However because of our last 9 years experience with the mobile operators in terms of various services we are proud to say that we can very well utilize our mobile marketing platform once we have adequate back-end support from an LBS company. Let us see how it can be done.
We call mobile as a 7th Mass media which is far more intelligent and interactive than all its 6 predecessors. For eg: print, recording, cinema, T.V., etc., could only carry one way messaging and it is very difficult to assess the details about the viewers or receivers. Whereas, mobile is not only omni present and omni potent, the actual details of the subscribers could be effortlessly tracked in terms of demography, psychography and other buyers behavior which could be analyzed in future for interesting research on consumers up take. Let us see now why mobile is so important.
Although mobile is the recent phenomena, today we have 30000 mobile connections per one lakh of population. Now compare this figure with other key growth identifiers. We have 7 ATM, 24 bank branches, 7400 internet subscribers, 2000 credit cards per one lakh of population. This statistics simply shows that the recent mobile phenomena have already over taken the much older services and facilities by many folds to propel this country in the path of seamless connectivity.
Mobile phone is always on, is always carried, has a built in payment channel and finally it is the first media with near perfect audience data. It is available at the point of creative impulse enabling user generated content. Therefore marketing of products and services through mobile phone is one of the best ways of doing the business. Mobile phone can do internal branding by creating value. At the same time, it can develop external branding by communicating value.
The greatest feature of mobile is that it can identify the location of the subscriber through various means and that is why mobile marketing is very affective because marketing can be done through mobile phone depending on the place and time. Mobile marketing comes under the ambit of Value Added Services (VAS) provided by the mobile operators. And mobile VAS is a product of a very complex eco system wherein apart from operators telco Infrastructure Company, IT integrator, SIM manufacturer, content owner, ASP, content aggregators etc., play very important role under the policy guidelines of the govt.
Mobile LBS can help the subscriber to locate her position, to find out, some important places, to get a route map, to find out her buddy etc., through the combination of variety of following technologies. eg: Gio-special software, geo-special database, assisted GPS, wireless data network, mobile applications etc. Mobile marketing when supported with LBS could be really very affective because of the two reasons. It influences the buying behavior of the consumer when she is within the action zone. Secondly, it helps the enterprises to tap the niche customer segment. Thus, LBS has come a long way from a pure play turn by turn navigation system to a real horizontal support application to facilitate social networking, active life style, work force management etc., tapping both consumer and the enterprise in mobile VAS space. The survey conducted in US clearly shows that LBS is one of the most popular mobile VAS application.
The recent research also shows that in US, operators are earning maximum amount of revenue on mobile LBS. LBS when used for mobile marketing could deliver branded location based info. For eg: the direction to a night club could be forwarded to mobile subscribers promoted by the beer brand. Similarly enterprise could attract the customer at a non peak time when their business is low. For eg: Restaurants could sell meal coupons during happy hours. Real estate companies could virtually delight the customers by pumping details of a flat in terms of MMS when a potential tenant enters a new locality in search for a house. LBS could be offered by the operators primarily through 4 methods viz. Cell ID, Angle of Arrival (AOA), Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDA). All this 4 methods vary in terms of accuracy and requirements. From practical point of view we have found out that the Cell ID base promotion is very affective in urban condition.
In mobile VAS space, assisted GPS is the most preferred tool to deliver LBS because of less battery consumption and because of accurate and first positioning even in densely populated urban area with many tall buildings. Operators have to provide an assistance server in their infrastructure (switch / BTS) to track and analyze data from GPS satellites so that the requirement of the software application(client) in the mobile phone is less and the connectivity is seamless for (time to first fix, TTFF) resolution.
However before launching any LBS marketing service through mobile we must do a proper market analysis, product analysis, and a full scale operational review to answer few of the following questions. For eg: Who are you targeting to buy the services? What pain point are you solving, means what is the scope? Are you aligning yourself with a good technology partner? What is the scale of operation to start with?
In conclusion, before we plan to launch any LBS service we must get a full view on the subject.