Mobilized Marketing: How to Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices

Epilogue

I love my job. We should all experience the rush I feel each day when I evangelize on behalf of the mobile industry and, of course, my employer Hipcricket.

But there is one thing that frustrates me. It is the perception that as marketers we don’t know enough about mobile to make confident and wise decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From resources mentioned in this book like the Pew Internet & American Life Project to InsightExpress and the Mobile Marketing Association to many, many others, there is ample data available to understand consumer behaviors and interests. It’s also wise to use history as a guide.

For instance, it has taken more than two decades for text messaging to become a daily activity for well over 200 million Americans young and old. It took technological standardization, cross-carrier transmission, ubiquity on nearly every device sold, affordable pricing, and a tipping point.

I’ll argue that Johnny and Tiffany created the tipping point for text messaging. In your family or circle of friends, they might be named Steve and Jill, but the point is that Johnny and Tiffany are representative of those young people who don’t even know that a phone has a voice capability. Yet their mom or aunt or grandpa needs to pick up the kids at soccer practice, and the only way to reach them is via text. So who do you think becomes the fastest growing segment of texters? Boomers and older generations.

The point is that we should learn from history and not ...