Blog skyhook logo The Power of Mobile Moments: MITX Mobile 2014 Keynote

Apr 25, 2014 1:30:00 PM

The Power of Mobile Moments: MITX Mobile 2014 Keynote

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Great minds came together yesterday at the MITX Mobile Summit in Boston, MA to discuss the power of mobile for branding, advertising, and gathering data. The outstanding theme throughout the day was how mobile is a game changer for businesses, offering many new opportunities for growth as well as many challenges that need to be addressed.

The summit was kicked off by Josh Bernoff, the SVP of Idea Development at Forrester Research, who began the discussion by referring to mobile as “the battleground of the future”. Bernoff nailed the point that mobile is a complete transformation of the way people interact, affecting every relationship, every consumer and every business. It is changing the way we think about what is expected.

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This change in expectation leads to what Bernoff calls “the mobile mind shift”, which he describes as the change in peoples’ minds that has to happen in order to adopt the mobile trend. The most significant change happens in the mind of the customer, but the other huge shift has to happen at the company level by re engineering processes for fast paced, real-time information.

“A mobile moment is a point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants immediately, in context,” says Bernoff, “They are pervasive, and the challenge is that these moments can get swallowed up if companies don’t leverage the opportunity”. In a world where marketing is becoming less effective, how do you get to customers? “The way you do it,” Bernoff explains, “is to offer them mobile utility.” In order to take advantage of mobile moments, companies must stop thinking about what their company or site does, but focus on what their customers want and how they can leverage mobile devices to serve them.  

So how do you approach this? Bernoff gives us a strategic discipline for how to attack mobile moments called the IDEA Cycle.

  • Identify the mobile moments in your customers’ day and the context around them

  • Design the mobile engagement

  • Engineer your platforms, processes and people for mobile

  • Analyze results to monitor performance and optimize outcomes

He gives a great example of how Johnson & Johnson manufactures mobile moments and finds a way to reach their users at their time of need on their mobile device.  Johnson & Johnson realizes that people with new babies will do anything for a little sleep, so they created an app called Bedtime to help parents grab an extra wink.  The app enables parents to log their baby’s sleep time, ask expert questions and play lullabies on repeat for that craved moment of peace. The app also shares a sleep routine that involves a bath and a baby massage with Johnson & Johnson products before bedtime to help parents sooth their baby to sleep.

“Mobile is a means in which to shorten the distance between what customers want and what they are actually getting,” concludes Bernoff. He leaves the audience contemplating the power of context with mobile and how important it is to know when to insert mobile moments into the lives of customers.  

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