Planning of Mobile Brand Communication

Abstract

The growing popularity of mobile devices is accompanied by a systematic increase in their share of the consumer’s contact time with mass media. Managers aware of those changes spend an increasing proportion of budgets on mobile communication. Its uniqueness is primarily due to contextual nature of mobile communication, as the messages on the screens of smartphones and tablets have a chance to appear just before deciding to purchase a product or even while the consumer is in store. Mobile com-munication creates a great opportunity to test a variety of message platforms and nature of promotional incentives so that later only those that prove to be effective can be used on a mass scale. Traditional approach to marketing communication planning, in which managers try to match characteristics of media audience to the (mainly) demographic characteristics of target audience turns out to be inadequate to the specifics of mobile communications. The article suggests to take as a starting point for mobile communications’ planning process the diagnosis of “mobile maturity” of target audience and inclusion of the stage on “consumer journey” in which she is subjected to the influence of mobile communication. Possibilities for its use are in fact very different at various stages, with the widest to be at the stage of active consideration of competing brands and during purchase at the store. Selected tools (eg mobile applications) can be extremely effective at other stages of the journey (in this particular case - at the stage of brand relationship building). If you also manage to combine different mobile actions with realization of sales targets there is a chance for implementation of the requirement of calculating return on investment of mobile brand communications.