Online price comparison has been fantastic for online shops, enabling products to be easily discovered and marketing to be easily measured all the way from click to conversion. Until recently, offline merchants were largely left out of the loop.

This was partly to do with a reluctance to enter the fray of online marketing because measurability was difficult. The same can be said of other online marketing activities like SEO and social media – yet you will find few people that believe that these difficult to measure channels are not some of the most important emerging frontiers for marketing.

However, the new frontier of mobile is becoming more and more a part of everyday life for shoppers. In fact, smartphones are believed to reach a mind-blowing penetration of 30% in the U.S. (of all mobile phones) by 2011. A portable shopping kiosk in the pocket – mobile retail is a channel that cannot be dismissed.

The Lasoo iPhone app has been downloaded over 25,000 times and search activity is unwavering, despite seasonal trends witnessed online. Even anecdotally, I see more and more people staring into the fourth screen while shopping. So how do you take advantage of this activity?

Being part of aggregated search is a given for a first step, but there are more important questions for many brand managers. How do I extend my reach with my own application? How do I maintain a conversation with my most loyal customers (and likely more affluent)?

The answer lies in developing an application that solves a fundamental problem for your customer. Gimmicks won’t last long, nor will pure marketing pushes (that is what RSS readers are for). What people are longing for when mobile is utility, ideally contextual utility. They want location-based information - and lots of it.

If a mobile application doesn’t tick those fundamental boxes, then it should just remain a desktop application. The battle to be one of the 176 apps a user can have on their iPhone is fierce, and even fiercer to be one of the 15 they actually use.

For many retailers, this may put them between a rock and a hard place – if my retail footprint is small, what location-based information can I offer that is relevant? Or, if I’m only online, what kind of experience can I offer a mobile shopper to give them utility?

For each retailer it will be different, and it should be unique to the customer’s desires and specific to your product range. For starters, we currently know that 360 degree product views are high on a customer’s wish list, so offering this through a touch interface would check the “large amount of information” box and offer a new experience – but don’t forget the price as well (the most important piece of information.)

Alternatively, using it for managing a loyalty program (rather than relying on a card) could also prove beneficial. You could enable checkins via Four Square, or show customer purchase histories in the app and reward big spenders (as well as having a constant communication channel for sales promotions).

And then there is the iPad, Apple’s newest device to be launched, which sits somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop computer. Creating yet another great platform for digital delivery, the iPad enhances customer experience and complements any robust multi-channel strategy.

In each case, it requires a bit of technical mastery, and more than just a replication of what you already have on the web. If web replication is what you are planning, then please make a mobile website that is open to all devices, indexable by Google and cheaper to build.

The reality is that most online shopping behaviour currently revolves around short engagements with individual retailers: get in and get out information consumption. According to Compete’s US smartphone survey, 68% of people use smartphones for finding shipping information, 68% to find store hours, 52% for product descriptions, 45% for third-party consumer reviews... The list goes on for similar forms of information consumption that wouldn’t warrant an individual store app to provide it when a mobile web site will service that need much better.

In short, think carefully about your mobile strategy, particularly when considering building an app. Don’t go there just because everyone else is. Go there because you can provide a unique service for your customers’ desires.

Paul Marshall
Lasoo.com.au