VALUE OF TEXT MESSAGING

Why mobile phones offer untold marketing opportunities – Dr. Muneer Muhamed

Consumers spend hours on mobile devices every day, watching movies, and sending clips and pictures in real-time. Typing messages is something we all do irrespective of our age, income or education. It is mostly unintrusive and there’s a whole new protocol of texting sans grammar or punctuation.

Gen Zs become tech savvy in their infancy; and they’ve been ardent users of short messaging services or text message services offered by mobile telephony. This 24/7 use of mobile phones has spurred the marketing of text messages, which enables users to send messages quickly and cheaply.

According to industry sources, there are over five billion subscribers globally and they will send around 100 trillion text messages this year. Person-to-person texting still accounts for the most traffic – particularly among youth – and text messaging is becoming popular in the marketing arena as well.

Texting is an excellent means of communicating brand values because it is a highly personal and direct medium. But this form of marketing – let’s call it ‘text marketing’ – isn’t without its serious problems. Usually, telecom service providers and regulators are the primary obstacles to creating a successful text messaging campaign.

Unless carriers are willing to participate in a promotion, it won’t work because they’re hesitant to give away phone numbers. And with stringent restrictions on marketing companies where individuals’ privacy is concerned, it will be increasingly difficult to conduct a successful campaign.

Unfortunately, carriers are not adept at putting together marketing plans. They haven’t done their homework on profiling individuals so promotions often come off as spam. This has caused a backlash in many countries including the US, the Philippines and Singapore.

Most telcos haven’t figured out how to use this new form of marketing effectively since they treat text messaging as a mass medium rather than a personalised channel. And their delay in figuring this out has resulted in losing business to social media channels such as WhatsApp. These companies are happy to sell premium texting services for obvious reasons.

The costs vary depending on whether marketers send messages to consumers or consumers to companies, or both. Marketing costs vary depending on many variables such as an external agency involved for strategy and creativity; carrier and third-party data costs; and the overall complexity of the campaign.

So far, the two most successful forms of text marketing involve digital coupons and time or event-based messaging, which usually involve other forms of media and an intuitive process on the part of consumers who opt in voluntarily.

Coke launched a successful text marketing campaign to create a messaging contest in China some years ago in partnership with a leading mobile phone brand.

Mobile phone users were invited to guess the next day’s temperature in Beijing – a correct guess could win them a Siemens phone or year’s supply of Coke. Contestants who didn’t win were invited to download Coke’s jingle as a free ringtone.

Four million messages were exchanged during the 40 day promotion and nearly 50,000 people downloaded the jingle.

Several ad agencies have set up interactive divisions to handle messaging campaigns. We all know that mobile phone penetration has outstripped that of fixed line phones and PCs. As I mentioned at a forum recently, we have more mobile phones than toothbrushes. Most people use only one toothbrush whereas many carry two or more mobile phones!

Asia is a trendsetter in terms of the importance and influence of mobile phones, and the interest of advertisers in messaging or text marketing is very high already.

For example, Asia Pacific Breweries conducted a text teaser campaign to promote Anchor Beer’s new packaging and flavour. It invited potential customers to ‘have a beer on us’ through text messages. Around 24 percent of recipients accepted the offer and were sent a secret serial number redeemable for a free beer at select clubs.

In another Asian country where there was interest in boosting the use of text messaging in general, a leading ad agency developed a campaign titled ‘King for a Week’ for a telecom brand. Each week, the person who sent the highest number of text messages was treated like a king, and his or her wishes were fulfilled, filmed and aired on cable TV. The contest boosted texting services revenue by more than 25 percent a week.

Singapore created a buzz when people checked their phones to find friendly messages from God. Working for the evangelical Churches of the Love Singapore Movement, Ogilvy transmitted witticisms purportedly from God via SMS. On Friday afternoons, many Singaporeans received a message, which said: “Thank me it’s Friday. God.”

SMEs should put on their creative hats to build interesting innovations on this front and gain good ROI for their marketing investments.