Second verse, same as the first. While we’ve already given you the big picture on the mobile space, we also sat in on a number of panels with smartphone app-makers, who certainly have a vested interest in encouraging brands to create more new apps. So, what was their verdict on our After the App trend, and the prospect of consumers feeling weighed down by an abundance of apps to choose from?
They think we’re right, of course. Duh.
One question that popped up throughout the week was whether a brand should be creating their own apps versus advertising in (or sponsoring) existing and emerging apps. Allison Mooney, VP of Emerging Trends at Mobile Behavior, admitted that advertisers and agencies are still more inclined to build their own apps, presumably because the brands assume they can more completely control the user experience. Of course, that “experience” may only have an audience of a couple of people, since consumers are looking for the most useful and entertaining apps whether or not they’re branded. When a branded app goes up against something that’s been created to explicitly address a need or niche, it’s not surprising that there are only a handful of branded apps that break out of the pack.
However, there’s a golden opportunity hidden at the intersection of brands and independent apps. Since app-makers struggle to stand out in oversaturated app stores, many have found that partnering with a brand (and piggybacking on that brand’s marketing budget) can help drive awareness and adoption of their app. Meanwhile, the brands benefit from partnering with apps that do a far better job of engaging with consumers, enabling these brands to connect with consumers in far more compelling ways.
For instance, why do you think we focused our recent Potty Posting on foursquare instead of Gowalla? Because having a lowercase name makes them cooler? No, because foursquare’s managed to get the attention of the public by piggybacking on their high-profile partners! Ask the foursquare guys why their Bravo tie-in was such a success, and they’ll bluntly tell you the obvious: highlighting the campaign in a TV commercial is a pretty damn good way to build awareness. Similarly, the success of Kraft’s iFood assistant isn’t just a product of the public’s undying allegiance to the Oreo: Kraft’s Director of Innovation and Consumer Experience points out that promoting the app across all of Kraft’s marketing channels was necessary to introduce the app to the public. Mooney called out Charmin’s sponsorship of the pre-existing Sit or Squat app as the ultimate success story, arguing that the brand has become so entwined with the app that most people instinctively refer to the program as “Charmin’s Sit or Squat.”
All of these examples demonstrate that marketing an app is no different than marketing any traditional, offline product. You still need to break through the clutter, you still need to challenge indifference when consumers are browsing app markets, and you still need to engage in an integrated, multichannel approach. Brands and marketers can teach tech upstarts a thing or two about these areas, while the app-makers can bring their out-of-the-box solutions to brands looking for innovative partners. Everybody wins, including the consumer.
But what makes an app successful, anyway? Flurry’s Sean Galligan makes an excellent point that different apps engage users in different ways. He notes that social networking apps average nearly 20 (short) sessions per month, while news app average nearly 10 minutes per (infrequent) session. For the aforementioned Kraft app, about 60% of users continued to use the app after six months, which is commendably high in an environment with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from. So, this begs another question when considering a leap into the mobile app space: what exactly is the point here? Are you trying to drive frequent, short interactions, or long, immersive engagement? Do you know why you’d want one over the other? You’d better.
Of course, this is all assuming that apps are the way your brand wants to go. With the Android platform finally making some inroads on Apple’s dominance of the app world (and the impending arrival of the Windows phone), it’s becoming increasingly clear that app-makers will need to create several versions of their apps for each mobile operating system in order to succeed. Boy, that sounds like a lot of work, especially when the mobile browsing experience continues to improve. As depicted in the chart above (from a report by Taptu), the 170,000 or so apps in Apple and Google’s app stores don’t look so hot when they’re up against 325,000+ mobile web pages (and growing). Moreover, a lot of those apps are for fun and games, while the business of driving sales is increasingly occurring on the mobile web (see the image to the right for the breakdown, or click the Taptu link above for more details).
So, we go back to the question we asked when we first introduced After the App in our 10 Trends for 2010: are you creating an engaging enough experience to command real-estate on a user’s app menu? Are you sure? If you can’t affirmatively answer “HELL YEAH!” then perhaps it’s time to focus on improving your mobile web experience. Chances are, you’ll have a leg up on your competition as the mobile browsing experience continues to improve.
More SXSW goodness comin’ right up!
