Is there an app that tells you when your brand should build an app? | digital | campaign asia

Digital, Opinions
Nagendra Singh | May 6, 2016
Is there an app that tells you when your
brand should build an app?
Unfortunately, there's no easy formula to determine when it makes sense for
your brand to develop an app. Nagendra Singh of Blue Hive Asia describes
how to develop a comprehensive mobile strategy that may—or may not—
include an app.
Nagendra Singh
Never before in the history of advertising was there a time when people willingly
carried an advertising-enabled device almost everywhere. It’s the ﬁrst thing they
check in the morning and the last when they go to bed, and the usage continues
throughout the day. This device knows more about them than they do about
themselves. It tracks their movement, things they like, what they are going to do in
future, and therefore in a position to predict what information they might need at a
speciﬁc period in time.
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This should be enough to make the marketers jump with joy, for they finally have a
medium unparalleled in reach and impact. But very few seem to know how to make
best use of this device to the advantage of their brands.
Of course, it has to do with how people use their smartphones: Flurry estimates 86
percent of the total time spent is on apps, whereas only 14 percent is on browser. Out
of the total time spent on apps, 36 percent of is on gaming and entertainment, 32
percent on social media, and the remaining 18 percent goes to news, productivity,
utilities and other apps. Unless your branded app serves any of these purposes, and
does it better than users’ existing favourites, it is unlikely to get a share of their
attention, even if it gets downloaded. Considering 90 percent of the branded apps
have fewer than 10,000 downloads, the chances of success are slim.
This hasn’t deterred the marketers from building apps for their brands. As per
Salesforce, mobile apps were supposed to be one of the top three focus areas in 2015,
with 34 percent of marketers planning to launch at least one app. By the end of 2017,
market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times
faster than the capacity to deliver them, according to Gartner.
Technical aspects aside, some of the prominent reasons why branded apps don’t
deliver the desired impact are:
Lack of purpose
Users will only download an app if it provides considerable value in exchange for their
personal data and time. It must solve a problem, entertain them, or connect them to
their friends—and do it better than other available apps. Considering there are over
1.6 million apps on Google Play and 1.5 million on the Apple App Store (statista.com),
it is highly unlikely the brands will be able to come up with something of universal
value that doesn’t exist already.
Nevertheless, the quest for greater adoption makes brand move forward without
giving enough thought to their brand purpose, which defines their 'justified territory'.
They therefore go on to solve someone else’s problem, such as a power-saving app
from an automobile brand. More ambitious ones get bedazzled by the Facebooks and
Zyngas of the world, and undertake a hugely resource-intensive task like developing a
game or building a social network, completely forgetting even the internet giants
awash with money and talent have had limited success in this space. Remember that
Google has tried and failed to build a social network, not once, but thrice.
Short-term focus
Most marketers think of apps as marketing campaigns. This myopic view results in
apps making no progress on organic discoverability, and to overcome an already high
barrier of millions of apps, huge sums are spent to get downloads. Since the content is
usually not compelling enough, gratifications drive the engagement, and as soon as
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things start to look good, the campaign ends and the app is abandoned—along with
the opportunity for sustained long-term engagement with the user. Successful apps
are adaptable to change. They require sustained investments to fix issues, introduce
new features, and continuously improve the user experience.
Lack of an engagement plan
App usage is bound to decline if it doesn’t incorporate well-thought-out content
interventions shared at the right time. These content interventions play to the
strength of the mobile and take advantage of spontaneous, geo-sensitive usage for
short period of time. Even apps belonging to popular categories like shopping have to
reach out to users through a mix of notifications, reminders and refreshed content to
remind them about their presence on the device. Statistics suggest that 95 percent of
apps are abandoned within a month. Loopholes in strategy notwithstanding, it is often
the execution that fails to engage users at an opportune time or win the dormant/lost
ones back.
A Forrester report nicely sums the situation and offers some way forward as well:
“Customers aren’t finding our apps to be compelling or convenient enough to
outweigh the inhibitors of discovering, downloading, installing, and customising
them. Consumers are, however, spending an increasing number of minutes each
month on mobile phones in apps that offer compelling utility or entertainment.
That doesn't mean you don't need an app. It means you must develop a mobile
strategy that goes beyond owning mobile moments to borrow, rent, and use them
from a broader ecosystem of partners.
”A comprehensive mobile strategy
A comprehensive mobile strategy largely consists of identifying and managing mobile
moments—instances in which a person uses their mobile to get specific information.
Customers typically have 150 mobile moments every day (KPCB, 2013 Internet
Report) over a total usage time of 177 minutes. Most of them may not be useful to a
brand as they pertain to personal activities like checking messages or posting updates.
In these moments, users are not necessarily looking to engage with brands. But there
are some moments where brands could play a role, especially when users are looking
for information. The key to success lies in taking a proactive approach to map out such
mobile moments first, understand the intent and the context behind them and build a
list of permutations and combinations of responses to be fed into an intelligent multi-
device system which is able to respond quickly across the purchase funnel in both pre-
purchase and ownership stages.
Pre-purchase stage
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The pre-purchase stage is divided into two sub-stages: before the ‘need trigger’ and
after it. The need trigger could be induced by an event, or it could be a drawn-out,
multi-step, seemingly dormant process in which the customer leaves a lot of abstract
signals. These signals are complex and could change as per the product category,
individual preferences and the loss in offline-online transition. With the internet of
things (IoT) gradually becoming a reality, we should be able to sharpen the signals to
extract meaningful insights. Until that time, marketers will have to rely on data shared
by sensors on smartphone and other connected devices to make our responses more
targeted and relevant, such as businesses that have been using GPS location to push
localised offers.
The need trigger could come from offline or online sources, or a combination of both,
as simultaneous consumption of media is becoming more of a norm (Millward Brown
AdReaction, 2014). As a result of the trigger, the user is likely to engage in an
information/solution search through available channels. This initiation of search is
called the ‘Zero Moment of Truth’ (ZMOT).
At this stage, if customer awareness about a brand is low, most of the mobile moments
will be category- or competition-based searches. On the other hand, if category/brand
awareness is significant, the user is likely to search for brand terms or visit a brand or
ecommerce website. Depending on the stage of the user in the purchase cycle, the
intent could range from pure research to immediate transaction. Therefore, we should
prepare for a variety of response to deliver the best possible response to user’s query.
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At this stage, building an app doesn’t make sense unless there’s a superb engagement
idea. A search-optimised mobile site should be able to cover all the bases, especially
the informational search queries related to the product. Therefore, the investment
should be channelled to improve the visibility (both paid and organic) of the website in
search engines through context-speciﬁc content.
Ownership stage
A customer’s positive experience with a brand gives the company more attention and
therefore a greater opportunity to drive engagement, especially in case of a high-
involvement purchase. Most marketers get greedy at this stage, and start building an
app, which looks good on their CVs but doesn’t deliver any signiﬁcant business or user
value. There’s nothing wrong with the intent of getting more out of the relationship,
provided a sanity check is done against the three key reasons for failure mentioned
above.
Mobile moments in the ownership stage will be related to the customer trying to
understand more about the product, and seeking more proof points to justify his/her
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purpose. They could also be related to potential issues or service. A brand’s role here
is to provide content that bridges any potential gap in customers' understanding and
lets them take the full advantage of the product features while building pride in the
ownership. ‘How to’ videos and interactive illustrations can be particularly helpful in
bridging the knowledge gap, whereas infographics and larger-than-life videos provide
customers with tools to flaunt among their social circles.
Again, most of the information needs can be fulfilled through a mobile-friendly brand
website or social-media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The need for a native
app does not arise except in cases where the customer expects frequent interaction
with the brand, such as the financial category. However, discoverability of the content
could be a potential issue, especially when organic ranking takes time, and even then
may not get to the desired levels. In such situations there could be a case for
integrating such content into an app, which gets frequently refreshed and reaches out
to the customer as per the engagement plan.
Brands can also forge partnerships with existing popular platforms like WeChat to
‘borrow and rent’ mobile moments. This will not only save development effort for
multiple OSes, but also minimise user interaction and acquisition costs. Considering
platforms like WeChat are becoming ‘all-in-one’ destinations for all mobile moments,
it is prudent to take advantage of the existing organic traffic and build ‘lightweight
apps’ that sit within the platform, yet don’t require a separate download or login (a
major adoption barrier).
At present there are over 10 million ‘official accounts’ on WeChat, including
celebrities, banks, media outlets, fashion brands, hospitals, drug stores, car
manufacturers, Internet startups, personal blogs. Seeing the success of this model, the
world’s biggest instant-messenger WhatsApp may also follow suit and start offering
similar services to businesses. Why is it critical? Because it’s unlikely that your
customers who own a smartphone don’t have at least one of these apps installed.
Brands have been using social platforms like Facebook, which imitate the functions of
a website from awareness to conversions, and have invested huge sums to build these
communities. We also need to start considering assistants like Siri, Google Now and
Cortana in our digital engagement plans. Google Now was recently opened for brands,
and some proactive brands (like Shaadi.com matchmaking services in India) have
already got on the bandwagon. The only drawback this approach of ‘borrowing and
renting’ moments has is the lack of brand control in terms of design and data. The
platform provider will continue to define the rules of the engagement—something we
can live with in immediate term.
Beyond mobile moments
Engagement opportunities can also come from studying users' interaction with a
product, the context around it, and how such interactions can be simplified, enhanced
or made interesting using a mobile phone. I call them product moments. And to my
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mind, they offer a more comprehensive, innovative and long-term solution to
sustained engagement. When we have such product moments mapped out in detail
and there’s a genuine value on offer to the user, building an app is recommended, as
such deep integration can only be achieved with a native platform.
Let’s consider a real-world case of a customer who’s just bought a car and spends a
significant part of his time in daily commute. After the initial curiosity around the
product subsides, he will initiate very few mobile moments related to the car, except
maybe, scheduling a service, keeping a track of service offers or finding the nearest
service centre. The customer will not go beyond these basic requirements, primarily
because they are the most important and frequent ones, and also because he doesn’t
know what else could be achieved with the mobile phone.
Here’s an example of how we can discover the product moments by studying his
typical weekday:
Obviously, achieving some of this would require product and process modifications.
Such opportunities may also vary as per the product/service categories. A cost-benefit
analysis should be done after exploring the product moments to assess whether
including any/all of these functions in an app makes sense.
Summary
'To build or not to build' an app is not the question. The real question is: what are the
specific brand challenges you’re trying to tackle, and how is a mobile app going to
achieve that for you—in ways better than other platforms. A comprehensive mobile
strategy based on mobile moments will definitely achieve greater impact than building
a standalone app. Having a permanent base in the most personal device of your
existing or potential customer is a grand vision worth chasing. However, it ultimately
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Yes No
comes down to what value you’re adding to the customer's life.
Nagendra Singh is regional digital planner at Blue Hive Asia Paciﬁc.

Source: Campaign Asia-Paciﬁc
Tags
APP | DEVELOPMENT
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