MCommerce workshop: Close, but no cigar
I attended a MCommerce workshop (mobile commerce) today and while I liked the presentations, I think none of them really hit home on neither the mobile, nor the commerce part.
The first presenter, professor Jan Damsgaard from the Copenhagen Business School told the story of how network products and services have changed basically everything about businesses, markets and customers, and how they relate to each other. I completely buy into this story, but I think it is mostly relevant to the net in general, and not specifically mobile products and services.
Next up was Innovation Lab agent Morten Povlsen who - in his broad presentation of mobile trends and things just around the corner - was probably closer to what I would have really liked to hear about. Morten took his cue from the trinity of operators, devices and content and I think the discussion following the presentation started to get interesting when it touched upon how mobile services sometimes cut across established distinctions between products, marketing and content.
I think both presentations suffered from a common - and very understandable misconception - that mobile services and products is about fitting the "old" Internet onto the mobile phone - "same as the Internet on a PC, but on a smaller screen and with crappy input devices" (I am making a crude generalization here, to get my point across). No less a misconception, it is understandable since we revert to what we know, when faced with something new.
What I would have really liked the workshop to focus on are the things specific to the mobile phone. To be sure, we can browse a website, or buy a book from Amazon, using a mobile phone - just as we can using a PC - but what is it that really sets the mobile phone apart? What is it that we cannot, or will not, do on a PC, but which the mobile phone enables us to do?
To briefly elaborate on this, I would like to plug one of my personal heroes, Tomi Ahonen and his notion of the mobile phone as the 7th mass media. In this view, the mobile phone is preceded by printing, recordings, movies, radio, TV and the Internet as mass media (in that order). An interesting aspect hereof is that (recent) mass media are cannibalistic. The Internet is all of the previous five mass media, and then some. The same goes for the mobile phone.
But again, what is it that really sets the mobile phone apart? Here, Ahonen has presented the seven unique benefits of mobile (please go read this post, it is full of wonderful cases in point):
- The mobile phone is the first personal mass media
- The mobile is permanently carried media
- The mobile is the only always-on mass media
- Mobile is the only mass media with a built-in payment mechanism
- Mobile is only media available at the point of creative inspiration
- Mobile is only media with accurate audience measurement
- Mobile captures the social context of media consumption
I do not think the seven benefits listed comprise any exhaustive definition, or that they are necessarily the right ones. But I do think they are a great starting point to think about the uniqueness of mobile products and services. The right and proper mobile services are to be found at the intersection of these properties and so, these benefits enable us to really understand the value proposition(s) mCommerce should present to consumers.
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