Mobile Fix: Digital transformation and Amazon’s secret plans
This week Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive! takes a look at how businesses are dealing with digital transformation, the blurring of lines between online and offline commerce, and new speculation surrounding the iPhone.
More and more of our work is helping businesses deal with digital transformation. The rise of mobile and social seem to be convincing C level execs that digital is no longer something that can be quarantined in a division.
But most find it hard to work out where the drive and management should come from. Marketing seems like the obvious place to start in many businesses but often this restricts the effectiveness.
For example, is Twitter a marketing channel or is it a customer service? Clearly it can be both, but we believe this skill will migrate from Soho ad agencies to call centres in Fife.
And another hot issue; given the use of customer data in smart programmatic buying, who drives that area? This is an interesting look at how clients are moving their business out of their traditional agencies and either taking it in-house or using specialists.
Many studies point out the potential conflict between CMO and CIOs, and in many cases the dead hand of IT frightens boards. Who wants to be the person who overrules IT when your system crashes or you get hacked.
In the US the firing of Target’s CEO after the company’s data hack made people realise that the responsibility lies with the top people. In his excellent keynote at the Dots conference Russell Davies told us that the IT people at GDS now report to the digital team.
Given the broad impact of digital on business and the potential for data to be transformational (McKinsey say that data driven companies are 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than others) the answer is to get the CMO and CIO working in partnership.
Done properly, digital is a core business function rather than a marketing channel and more and more brands are balancing getting outside advice with building internal skills.
O2O Retail – online to offline
With Amazon offering payment solutions to real world retailers, the line between online and offline commerce is blurring. Fold in click and collect and the potential for beacons to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a store and the line starts to disappear.
This article predicts Amazon’s secret plans – but if you get past the slight hysteria it’s a good take on where retail may be going. And the idea of online to offline is also being taken seriously in China.
As Alibaba prepare for their IPO – possibly as soon as next week – which is expected to raise around $20 billion, making it the biggest ever IPO (eclipsing Facebook whose $16 billion was the previous record), their competitors are trying to build their e-commerce revenues.
Baidu and Tencent have partnered with Dalian Wanda – the Westfield of China with around 100 malls and resorts – to focus on O2O; online to offline. This deal also helps them build their payments business.
All the big players (including GAFA and BAT) see that commerce has two huge advantages – you take a revenue share and you get the data on the purchase.
iPhone speculation
Lots of noise, but little insight in the huge numbers of stories speculating on what might get announced next week.
The Stratchery thinking on iPhone pricing is worth a read though. Where we use the luxury car market as an analogy, he used handbags and makes some good points on how Apple can preserve its top end positioning and maximise revenue. We still suspect that a Beats budget phone would be the killer and One More Thing.
The other theme we think is interesting is whether or not Apple embraces NFC and makes a big move into payments. Our Anchors theory means we believe Apple needs to turn Passbook into a full wallet which is so useful no-one will ever move to Android.
This piece points up the possibilities, but we wonder whether low energy Bluetooth means NFC is unnecessary? Or, picking up on our point about the value of payments above, does the widespread base of NFC readers in real world locations make it viable?
Either way Apple will dictate the future of NFC; if it makes the cut in the new iPhone it’s the definitive platform for payments. If it doesn’t, it’s just another dead three-letter acronym.
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website
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