3FER: Retail postmortem, emerging market adoption & smart socks

For the mobile world, 2015 took off with a boom. Still glowing after a strong holiday showing, mobile is becoming firmly entrenched in retail. For emerging market consumers, 2015 will be the Year of Mobile. And, post-CES, we’ll look at what will likely appear on your 2015 holiday gift list.

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#1: Retail Holiday Postmortem & New Year Forecast

Holiday sales were up 3.9% over last year, but sales tied to mobile were up 27.2% and, according to IBM, accounted for 22.6% of all online sales. Smartphones and tablets were not only hot gifts – they also drove nearly half of all web traffic. Likely buoyed by these numbers, in 2015 retailers will continue to invest heavily in mobile – especially beacons and mobile messaging – to catch up with consumer behavior.

Here are some deeper takes on these numbers, some tech tips, and a taste of what to expect in 2015:

Holiday Retail Benchmark Report (IBM)

How Usage Of Retailer Mobile Apps Evolved In Holiday 2014 (Marketing Land)

Here’s how iBeacons can fit into the mobile customer’s buying journey (Venture Beat)

Kohl’s exec says beacons are surefire bet for greater personalization (Mobile Marketer)

Beacons Coming to the Apple Watch for Grocery Shopping (MediaPost)

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#2: 2015 is the Year of Mobile in Emerging Markets

We’ve all heard the claims, again and again: This is mobile’s year! But while marketers largely waited for that great year to arrive, consumers saw it come and go, and most brands are still scrambling to catch up. Meanwhile, the innovators have moved on to emerging markets.

Thanks to a bevy of affordable smartphones, billions of consumers in China, India and many parts of Africa are entering the online world at an exceptional pace. By early 2016, India will have more smartphone users than the U.S.

With the numbers below, it’s no surprise why brands like Facebook, Tesco and Uber are battling for emerging-market consumers:

Mobile is eating the world (Andreeson Horowitz)

Mobile Internet Soars In Developing World (MediaPost)

Mobile becomes medium of choice for consumers in emerging markets (PitchonNet)

Global Mobile Marketers Need To Hone Strategies, Localization Efforts (MediaPost)

In India, Mobile Phone Use is the Elephant in the Room (MMW)

What Traversing Africa by Road Can Teach us about Technology, Community, and Impact (Ushahidi)

Can Uber make it in India? (Financial Times)

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#3: CES was all about wearable tech

Much of what’s hawked at the Consumer Electronics Show will never hit the store shelves or make a dent in your Amazon shopping card anytime soon (if ever). That said, wearables made a big splash this year. Here are some standouts in the category:

Impecca Alert Band Wants To Stop Drivers Falling Asleep At The Wheel (Wearable World News)

VivaLnk shows wearable NFC thermometer (NFC World)

Hyundai’s smartwatch app points to growth of wearables in autos (Mobile Marketer)

These washable smart socks can reduce injuries from running (GigaOm)

Montblanc smartens traditional timepiece with wearable add-on (Luxury Daily)

How to mobile-optimize your CRM

According to a recent ConstantContact study, more than 60 percent of businesses have optimized their websites for mobile browsers. That’s nearly a two-fold increase over 2013. They did this for good reason – web traffic from smartphones and tablets has finally overtaken traffic from desktops.

Our growing mobile device use, coupled with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, continues to blur the line between work and personal life. These days, it’s simply not enough for your business to optimize its websites for mobile users. You also need to mobile-optimize the foundation of your marketing and sales efforts: your CRM.

This process is not as difficult as you might expect. Since most mobile tools scale with ease, there’s little need for a radical overnight upgrade. You can adapt your CRM for mobile use over time. This will ease the pressure on your budget and ensure greater adoption by your users.

Not sure where to begin? Here are some quick recommendations and tips:

Make your CRM accessible across platforms.

Our mobile devices are the remote-controls of our lives. They wake us, tell us where to drive, and even compel us to turn around if we accidentally leave them at home. Mobile’s ubiquity allows us to better manage our work lives outside of business hours, often before we get out of bed.

Since the value of information increases as it becomes easier to access, opening up your CRM to your increasingly mobile teams is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.

Fortunately, most CRM providers offer you secure mobile web and app access. But not all platforms are created equal.

For example, Microsoft Dynamics users might seem to have endless options from both Microsoft and third-party providers. That’s great. However, if you need more than mobile web access, be sure to test the various apps for tablets and smartphones across all platforms. The user experience for a given provider’s individual apps can be slightly – or a lot – different on iPhone, iPad, Android or BlackBerry. During the review process, be sure to involve a mix of your power users to ensure that most users are satisfied.

[More on LinkedIn]

How to high-jack a country jukebox with a smartphone.

While many consultants–like myself–frequently highlight mobile’s dramatic changes to American consumer behavior, most are in ways we never would have expected.

My older brother and I went on a road trip recently to hunt for a car. While the car search was a dud, we were about to see how deep mobile technology is embedded in small-town America.

We found ourselves in Osceola, Indiana–population 2,456.

Now there isn’t much in Osceola, especially if you’re hungry. We ditched the idea of a quick sandwich from the gas station and dinner at either of the questionable sports bars nearby. We picked Trevi’s Italian Restaurant expecting some decent red sauce and cheap Chianti.

It turned out that Trevi’s was instead an exceptionally smokey dive bar that served pizza. It’s the kind of place where regulars enjoy cheap cigarettes, even cheaper beer, and lots of 1980’s heavy metal music. And like most small-town bars, they don’t favor fancy, Volvo-driving, out-of-towners like my brother and I.

Despite the PTSD that I was getting from an endless medley of Guns-n-Roses, directly commandeering that jukebox wasn’t an option. When you’re a stranger, dive-bar jukeboxes are like cute bear cubs–best approached cautiously, if at all.

Fortunately, this jukebox was different. It wasn’t a hulking music appliance that would skip if the front door slammed shut. It wasn’t loaded with old vinyl or out-of-circulation CDs. It was a modern, wall-mounted MP3 player with a blue data cable wired up to the ceiling.

[More on LinkedIn]

Apple just lost the global smartphone war to Google.

Much has been reported about Apple’s biggest volume day to date — selling 4 million iPhone 6’s in 24 hours worldwide this past Friday. It’s a tremendous achievement for any company.

Less has been said on how Google will sell 2 million smartphones by years end in one country alone — and how it will beat Apple in the process.

Buried under of all of the iPhone 6 Kool-Aid media bacchanalia, Google launched a smartphone that can’t be bought in the US, in a country where most Americans can’t find on a globe and at a profit margin that made Wall Street boil.

It’s the Android One, it was just released in India, and it’s proof that Google gets the global smartphone game.

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The iPhone 6’s markets are saturated; the Android One’s markets are not.

Many pundits classify Apple as an “aspirational” brand. Basically, Apple thinks locally and applies it globally. So in their mind what works in Cupertino will also work in Beijing, Mumbai and Mexico City. That technique has worked for Hollywood and luxury brands like Rolex, and Apple has gotten away with it for nearly a decade, until now.

In Apple’s primary market—the US, it controls 42% of smartphone sales. That’s a problem because the US is saturated with smartphones–roughly 75% of Americans own one. Most developed economies have similar ownership levels.

Instead of adapting to price sensitivities within emerging markets, Apple’s iPhone 6 starts at $649 (without contract) and tops out at $949. That’s an impossible purchase when the average household income in India is just US$7,700.

While Apple’s CEO Tim Cook might claim that China is now its biggest market, the company gave up 30% of its market share in the last year to local competitors Huawei and Xiaomi. (This happened despite blistering iPhone sales.) After flubbing the iPhone 5C launch in China, he still has not set a release date for the 6 and 6 plus—despite it being manufactured there.

In Mexico, its share dropped by 50% in the last 12 months. If fact, Apple has lost ground in almost all major economies in that same time period. Apple has lost its global mojo.

Google’s Android One launched in India this week for just $105, and carrier subsidies will drive that price down into the $60s. Amazon.in massive inventory sold out in a matter of hours. Google understands what works in Mountain View might not in Mumbai or Manila.

[More on LinkedIn.]

Learn how to use mobile marketing to grow your craft brewery

Craft brewing is exploding in America. Per the Brewers Association, Americans now enjoy beer from more than 3,000 breweries with another 2,000 coming. This level of choice makes building a sustainable customer base challenging for craft brewers.

Since 99 percent of craft brewers have limited distribution and budgets, most promotional methods remain financially out of reach, and are largely ineffective on a local scale. Unlike traditional tools, mobile marketing can have a huge, quantifiable impact on building awareness, generating taproom traffic and earning customer loyalty for craft brewers. And you don’t need the marketing resources of MillerCoors to impact your bottom line. In fact, most mobile marketing tools remain inexpensive, easy to use and simple to scale up. Having worked with many craft brewers, here are some quick suggestions:

Start simple, with your website

Your site is how people find out your taproom hours, who stocks your beer and what’s coming out of your tanks. It’s your information foundation. If your goal is to drive distribution sales or garner more awareness at beer fests, you won’t get far if people can’t access your information easily.

Since people don’t walk around with laptops, make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices — both smartphones and tablets. If you fail to take this step, most of your mobile visitors will likely never return, your social media efforts will fizzle and your other marketing investments will be wasted. Many of my clients have found that mobile traffic to their website continues at double-digit growth and often exceeds that from desktop browsers. This step can’t be skipped.

Focus on the beer fans and forget the rest

I’ve seen many of my craft brewers decrease their spending on traditional marketing tools like print ads or eliminate them altogether. That’s counter to typical marketing logic. Despite the blazing growth of craft breweries, big brewers still control 92.2 percent of the market. While that figure is eroding quickly, a majority of American beer drinkers still remain in the clutches of the big players with their massive national marketing budgets.

Read more in Craft Brewing Business.

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