Matt Asay is vice-president of mobile strategy at Adobe
“Mobile is eating the world,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Evans recently declared, arguing that mobile is fast becoming the default for how consumers interact with the world. As bold as that sounds, if anything, Evans isn’t hyping mobile enough.
After all, by the end of the decade, 90% of world’s population aged over six will have a mobile phone, according to Ericsson data. Nor are we passive owners of mobile devices: the average person looks at her smartphone over 200 times each day, spending over two hours on her device, according to Ofcom studies.
Which is really terrible news if your business isn’t as committed to mobile as your customers are.
For businesses still waiting for the mobile tsunami to subside, don’t. (Or, if you do, don’t worry: there’s an app for mobile denial.) “There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future of technology and the future of mobile,” Evans insists. “They are the same.”
Given this new normal, how should businesses respond?
Not Business As Usual
Every business aims to be customer-centric, but today “customer-centric” must translate to “mobile-centric.” While mobile marketers need to think about how this changes the way they reach customers, mobile demands much deeper and broader change.
Indeed, as Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of Global Marketing, tells Businessweek, mobile “is going to change not only marketing, but business completely.”
At Adobe, we’ve had to get ahead of the curve on this, as our own Adobe Digital Index research (which tracks 70% of all online spend across the top 500 online retailers) finds that mobile app users spend three to four times longer with a brand than web users do.
Companies can no longer hope to succeed by plastering customers with ads from afar. Instead, businesses must increasingly engage consumers when and where they choose.
We’ve Only Just Begun
Consumers are already mobile. Enterprises, if they want to remain relevant, must also go mobile. Adobe, with a range of services to help companies understand and engage their customers, makes it as easy and effective to do business on mobile devices as we have on the web.
And let’s be clear: by “mobile” we’re not just talking about smartphones and tablets, but also the hundreds of billions of devices that will comprise the Internet of Things. As we’ll show over the coming year, we’re going to give marketers the ability to understand customer data from a new generation of devices, and reach out to customers on these same devices, wherever they happen to be, at the time they most want to hear from brands.
This article originally appeared on Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog
