Make Meaning through Mobile
The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves. — Steven Spielberg
It’s December, but my phone is overdue for a good spring cleaning…the kind of cleaning that marketers dread. Gone is the app that facilitated a month-long obsession with cartooning photos. Gone is the learning app that proved to be only aspirational. Even top-tier social apps got buried to the rarely visited third page, as I strive to use them less. Similar to how organizational guru Marie Kondo “tidies up” the physical world, my digital environment must bring me joy, be useful, or both. And not just in the general sense, but specifically to me.
Personalization is THE topic in digital strategy today, and there’s no shortage of literature on it. IDC, Gartner, and Forrester consistently recognize IBM among the top digital strategy and customer experience leaders and we, like many others, talk about providing the right information to the right person at the right time. While this is true, it always strikes me as formulaic: give x and y, get z. But Media and Entertainment brands deal in passion, with customers who seek personal fulfillment and social media self-actualization.
In the context of strategizing how to guide consumers to meaningful life experiences, marketers become mentors, and personalization becomes more about engagement and advice than about selling. As a user, my mobile device provides a window into who I am, with my friends, fun, and finances all at my fingertips. Personalization based on my transaction history is not enough when it comes to mobile app design: I expect marketing mentors to provide an experience that is shaped in real-time by who I am and where I am, learning and adapting along the way.
Meet Users Where They Stand — Literally and Figuratively
Compelling entertainment suspends disbelief, whether I’m engrossed in a game-winning play, journeying to a fictional world, or singing my heart out with my 10,000 closest friends. Pulling me out of those moments instantly reduces my enjoyment. Mobile designers must use tools and contextual data to reduce that friction. IBM teams have integrated solutions to deliver food directly to my stadium seat, provide current queue time information, or geolocate shows in my neighborhood. This offloads the logistics of my entertainment to technology, allowing me focus on my fun. By building experiences that enhance the moment, IBM helped grow entertainment companies’ nominal add-ons into meaningful incremental revenue streams.
Just as brands can improve my experience by referencing my physical space and time, they can adapt my services according to my mental headspace. Behavioral data combined with my manually designated (or inferred) interests can indicate if I am looking to transact, explore, or be entertained, and technology must serve each intent differently. Most personalization efforts heavily emphasize speed to purchase, due both to the obvious incentives for getting me to buy faster and to the explicit customer frustration when the purchase path breaks down. IBM has helped clients reduce time to transaction by 25% through personalized, efficient UX. However beneficial that may be, the paradoxical implication is that quicker transaction paths mean less time in the app and less time thinking about the brand.
The explore and entertainment aspects of the app experience are essential to keeping me engaged long-term, so that the brand can stay top-of-mind through notifications and the continued presence of the app icon. An app without meaningful engagement becomes the digital embodiment of the pushy salesperson, driving me toward the competition or a complete abandonment of the service. Uninstall rates in the first month after download have hovered around 30% over the last few years, with 30% of those uninstalls due to finding a better app.
Let Users Choose Their Own Adventure
Traditional sales funnels assume consumers follow a linear journey from discovery through purchase. Advances in data analytics and personalization now provide more nuanced views into the multiple touchpoints and paths in which consumers will interact with a brand. That large quantity of information can lead brands into the trap of assuming they know what’s best for users. With the best of intentions, I’ve helped create features that were only accessible through geolocation, leaving the estimated 40% of users who are hesitant to share location unable to access upsells. Oops.
Recommended user journeys can never be perfect, especially as users share accounts or go through life changes, and we users don’t like to feel limited. Letting me as a consumer understand why I’m treated in a specific way and empowering me to adjust that approach increases my trust in what is being offered and reduces my fear and frustration with how providers use my data. Notifications best practices allow me to manage my preferred types of messages, but European Union GDPR regulations now mandate giving EU users unprecedented control over how personal data is collected and used. This forces brands to justify why they need my information (a mobile website demanded my SSN to pay a bill, pushing me to write a check and buy a stamp. A real stamp.), which is uncomfortable for the analysts and marketers accustomed to having control. Providers that effectively describe the added value of notifications, data collection, and location services prior to asking for authorization are much more likely to get my buy-in, which in turn provides them greater opportunities for insights and engagement.
Shape Two-Way Conversation
I enjoy reading 1-star reviews of US National Parks, because it reminds me that every experience will undoubtedly have both advocates and detractors. IBM uncovers useful consumer insights through Watson AI-powered sentiment analysis, however, passively following user feedback gives too much weight to the loudest (often negative) voices. Designing for proactive, appropriately-timed engagement can greatly enhance a brand’s understanding of user sentiment distribution and constructive criticism; IBM helped increase an app’s quantity of reviews by 10x and rating by two stars in one week simply by prompting in-app ratings and reviews.
Uncovering this new wealth of feedback gives customer service teams additional touchpoints to boost satisfaction and gives product owners additional insights into what enhancements will truly add value, with even Apple’s developer portal advocating the importance of re-engaging reviewers. Every brand will still have detractors, but this shifts the central bulk of the sentiment distribution ever closer to advocacy and negative reviews will carry less sway over prospective users.
Mobile engagement tools and techniques continue to expand at breakneck speed. Today’s newest idea becomes tomorrow’s fundamental expectation. As they do, the relationship between sellers and consumers becomes ever more intertwined, feeling progressively less personalized and increasingly more personal.
