Given the ease of access to information for the average consumer and the volume of messages in the market, companies need to evaluate the way they communicate with their target audience, says Lourens Botha, University of Pretoria Graduate School of Management lecturer.
"If you consider the points of contact with people include TV, radio, print, PC (Internet and e-mail), cellphone and landline, then one has to re-think the way one communicates with people, because the users of today undoubtedly have more information at their fingertips," adds Botha.
The three cellphone networks together claim to have a combined base of over 36 million subscribers, versus an estimated 24.5 million adult TV viewers in SA and over 28.5 million radio listeners. PCs and landlines come in at around the five million mark.
"Getting the consumer's attention, let alone getting your message across, is far more challenging," says Botha, who conceptualised and set up McCarthy Call-a-Car as an online car sales organisation in 1997. He warns that when customers "come knocking on your door, they are far better informed, which means your service offerings need to be slick and informative, otherwise they'll just go somewhere else".
Pick me
This is where the mobile phone suggests itself, says Riaan Groenewald, Multimedia Solutions operations director. "The cellphone stands out because it is the only device that is carried in people's pockets."
"While the cellphone will increasingly become the most effective way to reach someone, the challenge to companies is people don't want to receive what they consider to be unnecessary information on their phone, because of the importance a cellphone plays in people's everyday life," he says.
Botha says the first stage for companies wanting to build an effective communication campaign is to know more about their customer database and their preferred method of communication.
"The reality is even the cellular networks have very little information on their clients' personal preferences. And if companies are not aware of what kind of information people want to receive via their cellphone, they risk alienating the user, with messaging being labelled as spam or irrelevant information," he says.
Groenewald says, as a result, unless companies are using SMS purely as a notification service, they need to think about communicating with MMS and mobi Web sites.
"MMSes are content-rich, including video, sounds and pictures, and can have specific text for the user, utilising their name and providing them with information they want to receive (presuming the company has done its homework on what the user wants)," Groenewald says. "Furthermore, the consumer has the choice of whether to accept or reject an incoming MMS and should be able to unsubscribe from the service at any time."
Companies need to think about when they communicate with their base (week days and office hours, for example) and how regularly they communicate with them, so as not to alienate the receiver.
MMS also stands out from other mediums because it is not only free to download, but can give users something in addition, Groenewald adds. For example, backing music on an MMS can be saved as a ringtone, graphics can be saved as wallpapers and incentives can be given to the user, including entry into a competition or receiving a bar-coded digital voucher via MMS for responding to the MMS.
Botha says mobile communication will not only have more of an impact in future because of its ability to reach people more effectively than other mediums, but because of the experience mobile communications offers and the peripheral benefits mobile communication provides.
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