With 4G promising better and faster mobile broadband and figures popping up all over the place proving the importance of mobile in the world of shopping, it’s getting more and more vital for organisations to be thinking about how to make the most of mobile commerce.
O2 and Vodafone have joined forces with EE, the marriage of Orange and T-Mobile, to launch ‘Weve’ aiming to ‘accelerate the development of mobile marketing and wallet services in the UK‘. This new venture aims to standardise the way that we shop and make payments on mobile, which they say should make things easier for businesses wanting to get involved in m-commerce and consumers wanting to easily purchase things using their phones. In their own words:
“Weve has been formed to solve a critical problem for every business wanting to get involved in mobile commerce. Today, any organisation trying to engage with an increasingly mobile customer base is forced to engage with a bewildering mix of operators, services, platforms, channels and technologies – thus duplicating effort, increasing costs and making it impossible to get accurate and consistent insight into customer behaviour.”
The targeting potential of mobile advertising in this way is pretty exciting for many organisations, particularly with the strong focus on insights and integrating advertising and marketing with the concept of mobile wallets and m-commerce… but I think it will be really interesting to see how it’s received by consumers who, while I’m sure will find the easier ways to shop and pay on mobile great, may not be so open to another avenue for adverts to reach them!
As long as businesses do it right (and don’t just use this as another way to broadcast meaningless/annoying messages), this could be the big push m-commerce needs.