Can mobile marketing can harness the emotional power of “little things”?

At the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles today, the days event were wrapped up by Bryon Morrisson, President of Ipsh. His keynote address was called The Power of Little Things - and not even the MC knew what it was about before it started. It turned out to be about the potential power of little, human gestures when applied to mobile marketing.

Ipsh is a “full service” mobile marketing agency, meaning it can facilitate any kind of campaign on any mobile medium. It’s a part of The Marketing Arm network, and is entirely owned by the Omnicom Group.

Bryon introduced his speech by telling us a little story about Starbucks. He had been pondering what exactly he was going to talk to us about at the MMF. We’ve all been to a lot of mobile advertising conferences before, and there are very few topics we haven’t heard covered. Bryon was queuing in his car at the Starbucks drive-thru, considering if he’d talk about what the biggest challenges facing mobile marketing were. But we’ve heard that before. Or maybe what the next big thing was in mobile? But we’ve all heard that before as well.

That’s when he got his coffee, and the girl behind the said “it’s already paid for -  the car infront of you took care of it”. As he sat there in shock, she said “just a little thing to make your day better.” Isn’t that cool? It did make his day better! Someone ahead of him had paid it forward and made his day. Which is what got him thinking. It wasn’t the 2 dollar coffee that made him feel good. It was the disruption in a system he was used to. This individual made only a little change in his day - but that change disrupted a hum-drum routine and turned an existing model on its head.

This is the lesson that Bryon applied back to the mobile industry. As mobile matures, more and more it’s the LITTLE things that matter. This is not to say mobile is little. It’s incredibly important. But we’ve gotten to the stage where we can say mobile can be little, but still be important.

This is where Bryon got on back onto slightly familiar ground. It’s a suggestion I’ve heard before, but this was an interesting new way of introducing it. The idea is that there is always two parts to any consumer offering. There’s the rational promise, and the emotional promise. People in all segments of the mobile industry have been working incredibly hard to create efficient systems for years. Systems that offer customers good service, coupled with value and speed. This is the rational promise. And coming up with new systems and innovations will continue to drive the industry. But from a branding perspective, we need to look at things from both the rational and the emotional side. To go back to Starbucks, big fans of the chain get both promises fulfilled. They get their coffee, sure, but they also get a comfy chair and get to listen to music they like and to hang with their friends. It means something more to them than just the plain service.

Today, mobile is a service built on utility. A lot of people have worked hard to make it so. The rational promise is filled. But perhaps the emotional promise needs to be filled as well. That free coffee that day gave Bryon back a little emotianl touch with Starbuck, which had become a purely rational ritual.

So Bryon suggests we apply this to mobile. On mobile, we CAN impact with customers more. It’s a personal medium, and more engagement can be achieved on it. He even offered some suggestions:

- this one actually happened. Huggies Pull-Ups ran a joint marketing campaign with Disney. The parent could opt-in to have their little girl receive a phone call from a Disney Princess, congratulating her on her potty training. This got a pretty good response rate, and the girls tended to be absolutely thrilled by the call.
- having a WAP site for JCPenny is one thing, but using that WAP site to help deliver presents to kids on Christmas morning would mean a little more.
- mobile can make it more than just having an app, it can make it about being part of a movement. President Obama proved the power of that use of mobile phones.

What we think?

It’s a nice sentiment, but I’m not sure people will be as appreciative of these things as you might think. Take the JCPenneys example, for instance. It’s a nice idea, and it might be novel the first Christmas it happened. But it is part of human nature to start viewing service like that as the base-line. Pretty soon no-one would be impressed that you were helping to deliver Christmas presents - they would just expect it as part of the service, and the only emotion they would feel about it is aggravation if you stopped. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but I think that emotional content is not a sustainable marketing idea. By it’s very nature, advertising is about replicating that kind of thing, not generating the genuine article. I’m not saying that it’s impossible - adverts and marketing campaigns can have a genuine emotional impact. It’s just a rare thing, and I doubt that it could be achieved with the regularity needed to make it a viable mainstay of mobile marketing.