I’m speaking at a Google conference on mobile marketing this week and came across their recent study on the shift to mobile and what it means for brands. This takeaway jumped out at me:
“People are more loyal to their need in the moment than to any particular brand.”
The insight may sound obvious, but marketers don’t naturally operate that way. Marketers often follow the Lovemarks model of brands that Kevin Roberts defined as “loyalty beyond reason.” The emphasis sometimes gets placed on heart-string pulling ads and misses the importance of genuine utility.
Many brands fail at being there in useful ways when consumers are navigating the moments in their lives with their mobile devices. A well-loved brand that isn’t optimized for mobile may not be well-loved for long.
Google frames these opportunities as “micro-moments” and urged brands to find the micro-moments that matter for their consumers. The study summarizes their advice as be there, be useful, and be quick.
The Red Roof Inns hotel brand discovered that flight cancelations were stranding 90,000 passengers every day. Their marketing team decided to go after these micro-moments. They developed a way to track flight delays in real time and used that data to geo-target ads with messaging explicitly for people stranded at the airport. This prompted a 60% spike in bookings.
Optimizing for mobile is becoming table stakes for meaningful brands. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this shift.