The future of Premium Rate SMS?

Is there any more room for the humble content provider in todays consumer market? And is it really worth it?

Well, the saleman in me says yes of course there is, and always will be - as long as you have the cash funds to back you up and allow you to make some money. On the other hand, if you're a 9 to 5 worker and have a great idea, unless you're willing to take on a financial baker who's going to take a chunck of your profits off you, then sadly the inn is full.

I think that from here on, the real benefit that organisations will recieve is the information you can collect, for example, I bet you anything that from a well publicised competition the amount of information you can get from an individual consumer would be great, and here's where we see the benefit.

The best way to find an answer is to ask a question, and the best way to ask a question is with a carrot. For example, how does Coke-a-Cola really know the demographics of their consumer audience? Sure they do things like their market research campaigns where they get a bunch of kids in a room and ask them questions, but that's kind of limited. A much better way is to run a competition and ask them a question about themselves, either subtley or straight up.

A standard line is "SMS your name and age to 19xx xxxx", or "Text your name and address to 19xx xxx" - you could probably even ask them for their name, age and address for the trifector. What's the names of my consumers? How old are they? And where are they? This allows us to know how we price our products? Can our target audience afford to buy our product? How do we market our product? And where do we market product so that our customers can better be exposed to our branding?

It wasn't until Esendex that I really thought about marketing, and best practice market at that. Previously I'd worked for some large corporates that had their own marketing departments that looked after these matters - yes we had sales meetings that talked about how we can sell our products better, but being more effecient with our marketing dollar was not our concern, well not the concern of the sales division anyway.

This is why I'm such a big wrap for running compeitions with Premium Rate SMS services, is that it's relatively cheap, easy to use and thanks to shows like Australian Idol and Big Brother, people have no qualms about sending off a text message and obeying your demands of personal information - plus because it's a competition, people are more likely to be truthful for fear of missing out on that major prize!

Sure there will always be a Gumi Bear, Crazy Frog or whatever is on the horizon which somehow gets into the charts turning over vast sums of money, but as the most consumer friendly, consumer hip and the most consumer acceptable way of market research the greater community makes it king of the marketing castle.

And I thought day dreaming at work was a bad thing?

It's funny being a bit of a day dreamer myself I always thought that doing it during work hours meant that I wasn't effectively making best use of my time, and always found myself feeling somewhat guilty if I felt that I'd been away with the fairies for too long - despite most of the time I'd been thinking about work, how to close deals, how I could have done something differentlly, better and/or easier.

I was listening to a talk back radio station today as I was driving back from lunch and I didn't really get to hear much of the interview itself, but from what I got it was abhout thinking differently and allowing yourself time during the day or week to do nothing but play with new things, new ideas and so on. One of the examples he gave immediately was as part of Google's work policy they allow one full day per week for staff to do nothing but play with things, and use their resources with the hope of coming up with a good idea - Google Earth for instance!
They quickly followed up by then saying that companies like 3M have actually been doing this for years, and allow 15% of a staff memebers time for the same thing - and neither company attaches a KPI to this either, so there's no pressure to come up with something better than the last.

The philosopy behind this idea is that we as a business hire you as a staff member and we think you're smart, so we're going to allow you time to play be creative and hopefully we may get one solid idea out of you that can change the way we do things around here for the better.

The question that was mentioned that I thought was a great question was this - if our industry was recreated tomorrow what would we do differently, what would we do to improve the system and service?

So if I had the chance to recreate the mobile services industry or Esendex for that matter? I'm not sure, and that's probably something for another blog.

What I will be doing is looking at the way I organise myself so that I can make the time in the week that allows me to think about it!

Cheers,
C