The Core Issue in Mobile Marketing
A great letter to the editor of Mediapost in response to the article Marketing to the Disinterested by Steve Smith, a mobile industry commentator.
The response by Mark Pilipczuk from MAP Consulting LLC :
"You’re just seeing another manifestation of the constant push-pull between marketers and technologists. Technologists, and tech-savvy people, tend to love feature lists. True marketers will always want to home in on two or three key consumer benefits.
A lot of product development is unfortunately done via laundry list. Build the biggest, longest and most acronym-laden checklist and they’ll come, is how the thinking goes. But they, by and large, don’t. Nobody wants a ton of features. Tell me what the benefit is.
And I think that’s what a lot of the problem with the mobile web is. Forget the whiz-bang stuff you CAN do with the platform. Give me something that’s going to benefit me as the user.
Buy a soda from a machine with some kind of mobile micro-payment app lashup? Err, no. Coins solved that problem years ago. Give me a way to see a full web page on my phone so I can rebook a flight during a storm at LaGuardia (my actual experience on an iPhone). Now that’s a benefit I’m willing to pay for.
Think “benefit rich” products, not “feature laden” and we’ll get consumers to adopt our devices and media."
The response by Mark Pilipczuk from MAP Consulting LLC :
"You’re just seeing another manifestation of the constant push-pull between marketers and technologists. Technologists, and tech-savvy people, tend to love feature lists. True marketers will always want to home in on two or three key consumer benefits.
A lot of product development is unfortunately done via laundry list. Build the biggest, longest and most acronym-laden checklist and they’ll come, is how the thinking goes. But they, by and large, don’t. Nobody wants a ton of features. Tell me what the benefit is.
And I think that’s what a lot of the problem with the mobile web is. Forget the whiz-bang stuff you CAN do with the platform. Give me something that’s going to benefit me as the user.
Buy a soda from a machine with some kind of mobile micro-payment app lashup? Err, no. Coins solved that problem years ago. Give me a way to see a full web page on my phone so I can rebook a flight during a storm at LaGuardia (my actual experience on an iPhone). Now that’s a benefit I’m willing to pay for.
Think “benefit rich” products, not “feature laden” and we’ll get consumers to adopt our devices and media."
posted by malek @ 6:17 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Malek--thanks for saying my post was "great." The mistake of driving new products through features instead of benefits happens so much that it's a mystery to me why product managers don't catch on.
One example I use with college students about benefits vs features is to compare the Zune against the iPod. Sure, Apple had a huge lead with the iPod, but Microsoft tried to out-feature the iPod--which, arguably, they did--when they needed to out-benefit Apple.
More comments on marketing are on my blog at www.MAPConsultingLLC.com.
Superb blog post, I have book marked this internet site so ideally I’ll see much more on this subject in the foreseeable future!
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