Kraft is one of the biggest food brands in the USA, best known perhaps for their cheeses. I spotted on Twitter this week that Kraft is using the slogan 'no mobile left behind' in their philosophy about mobile and digital. It is actually a cross-platform strategy message, meaning, they want their online systems to remember mobile and make sure their pages and online services also can be accessed on mobile.
This makes a lot of sense even in the USA, where the ratio of PC to mobile access of the internet is most lop-sided in favor of the PC, of any country in the world. This is mostly due to historical reasons, the internet was invented in the USA (the mobile internet in Japan) and the USA has been one of the leaders in PC based 'fixed' internet use, while lagging seriously in mobile uses of data, and the mobile internet. Japan was among the first countries to see the mobile internet pass the fixed internet. And in the emerging world countries like India or the continent of Africa etc, the mobile internet has leapfrogged the PC based internet and mobile web use outnumbers PC web by ratios as high as 10 to 1.
But in the USA, it is still safely true, that most internet use is from PCs. Why then does Kraft say no mobile left behind? Because that digital divide also exists in the USA. The biggest adoption level of mobile as percentage of all internet use is among the poorest populations. The hispanic and black population use of the mobile internet is far higher than that of the total population. And some of Kraft's products are serving simple, cheap, instant foods to often the poorer parts of the country, most famously Kraft's Macaroni-and-cheese meals.
So if a web designer only focuses on broadband PC users with large screens and creates heavily animated welcoming screens, etc, those will be painfully slow and expensive to consume on basic browser (non smartphone) phones, on basic (non flat tariff) data plans. We have to remember that globally still today, of total number of users (not usage), a large number of mobile web users still access very basic browser services on WAP (not full HTML) over GPRS ie 2.5G networks (not 3G).
This can be seen as Kraft's way of mimicking what happened a decade ago in Japan. The early Japanese websites noticed that increasingly their users started to access the PC based websites, using the new internet-enabled mobile phones with tiny screens and slower speeds. So the Japanese websites adapted to it. They also noticed that while it was difficult to charge for content on the PC web, it was easier to do so on the mobile web, and they often turned their mobile websites as the revenue and profit engines to power the loss-making 'legacy' internet pages for PCs. This phenomenon was first explained in Wired, telling the story of Japanese loss-making internet brand Cybird which found its profits on the new mobile web. We've chronicled that same pattern in anything from the Financial Times mobile web pages to Flirtomatic.
No phone left behind. But there is an even better angle to the story. Its also a story about mobile services for any brand considering a mobile strategy. No phone left behind. It doesn't mean that you can't have more advanced services on HTML or Java or Bluetooth (which reach roughly speaking about half of all phones) or smartphone apps (which reach less than a quarter of all phones). But a consumer oriented brand should start with No Phone Left Behind, ie start with SMS and WAP and MMS (and voice). Pick one or two of those, and you reach all or at least 9 out of 10 phones. Then when you've done that, go ahead and do your smartphone apps or iPhone apps. If you start from the apps, it is a classic case of the iSyndrome, as Martin Wilson tells us, is the mistaken notion that creating an iPhone app translates into a mobile strategy.
So good for Kraft! Great philosphy. No phone left behind. And it applies to essentially all consumer brands on the planet. You can talk to your customers via basic services on the phone, like SMS, and reach all of them. Like I showed at the 7thMassMedia blog this week, when I showed the Daffy's campaign of the interactive window display (where male and female models dressed and undressed in full view of passers-by, who sent them SMS text messages of what to put on next).
The most brilliant moves often come from unexpected sources, so kudos to Kraft on a good mobile strategy.
It really infuriates me when I read about all those so called experts suggesting companies invest in iPhone and Android apps that most of the time amounts to a glorified themed RSS reader.
Mobile can do so much more than what most companies in North America are doing with it, it's such a tragic lack of imagination.
Posted by: Guillaume Beaumont | October 01, 2010 at 07:42 PM
Excellent to read. Actually the first big brand like this of which I read such a statement. can you send me the link, where Kraft posted this statement? thanks
Posted by: Alexander Oswald | October 03, 2010 at 04:00 PM
The Kraft iFood app for iPhone launched in 2008 hahaha
http://www.kraftrecipes.com/media/ifood.aspx
They even have a recipe book for iPods hahahaha
http://www.kraftrecipes.com/media/iPodrecipes.aspx
and an iPad app hahahahaha
http://www.kraftrecipes.com/media/bflf.aspx
Posted by: Kraft & iPods, iPads & iPhones | October 05, 2010 at 09:46 AM
Mr. Kraft (nice name :-), perhaps if they do have apps for iDevices already then they have realised that they are limiting their exposure to a small number of their potential consumers. Maybe this can be seen as an early sign that the businesses out there are beginning to realise that there is a much bigger audience to be reached than iOS users alone. A bit of a stretch to be sure, unless anyone working at Kraft is willing to share.
It seems to me that folks are beginning to agree that mobile will almost always win - it's too personal to lose, apart from certain areas where the device is physically too small. Further, since there are at least 5 (and increasing) different OS' which you should target for even the smartphone part of that market, then the apps strategy begins to look very expensive unless you have a killer intersection of user demographics and brand. I expect the web to take over almost all of this consumer relations and advertising activity eventually - isn't there a saying that 'web always wins', so why should it be different on mobile.. We're just not quite there with the technology yet, but we will be soon(ish).
Apple's original vision for the iPhone apps solution will turn out to be the right one, but they were just about 5 years too soon. I'm not blowing smoke up apple's ass though - I was in a startup back in the late 90s with (more or less) the same vision. We turned out to be at least 15 years too soon. We tried to get it going, but most people didn't get it. We probably weren't the first either - the idea has been around since at least '94 that I'm aware of. Apple won't be the last to go with a web solution either. Since then there has been at least Palm, and there is lots of global effort going into HTML5 and widget hosting environments. The difficulty in the web apps space isn't so much seeing that it's coming, it's predicting when.
Plus, HTML+CSS+Javascript is a really shitty technical solution, but it'll be 'good enough' on most devices in a few years. That's when we'll see the real explosion in mobile, this is just the beginning, maybe even still the beginning of the beginning.
Posted by: Chris | October 05, 2010 at 05:11 PM
"Then when you've done that, go ahead and do your smartphone apps or iPhone apps. If you start from the apps, it is a classic case of the iSyndrome, as Martin Wilson tells us, is the mistaken notion that creating an iPhone app translates into a mobile strategy."
That's a blanket statement - you can't apply that to all brands, sorry it's a ridiculous thing to say. Why not start with apps if the data supports it?
Posted by: Murat | October 08, 2010 at 10:00 AM
Hi Guillaume, Alexander, Kraft, Chris and Murat
Guillaume - thanks and we agree obviously
Alexander - I saw it referenced on Twitter from a comment from a tech conference. I am travelling now so having very limited accessability, but am eager to dig into the Kraft statement and find officials saying that and explaining it further. I will post the link when I find it (and obviously if any readers here have the link, please post)
Kraft - haha, thanks. I have no visibility to Kraft's past, but like Chris says here in reply to you, it may be that Kraft had an inefficient strategy in the past, or they may also have had other mobile methods in the past like SMS, WAP, voice IVR, etc.
Chris - thanks! Very good points and we agree.
Murat - you make a good point. There are of course some very specific areas where starting with an iPhone app makes sense - that is, if you are a tech brand, selling Apple eco-system related goods, lets say like Macintosh laptop bags or replacement earphones for iPods. Yes, if the target is very specifically that Apple user base (only) then yes, by all means, start with an iPhone app
In all other cases its the dumbest thing you can do. Your app immediately rejects 95% of Americans, 99% of Europeans and wealthy Asians and 99.5% of the rest of the planet by that moronic 'strategy'. The reason iSyndrome is so wide-spread is because Apple is the darling of both advertising and media brands, so they get stuck into a kind of alternate universe with group-think, because my friend from the ad agency also has an iPhone, and my boss the VP of marketing has an iPhone, therefore everybody on the planet has an iPhone (or at least, everybody who matters..)
In reality, every economically viable person has a mobile phone. The total population of mobile phone subscribers is 5.1 Billion and counting. The cumulative sales of iPhones is about 60 million, far less than those are actually in use. That means about 1% of all mobile phone users on the planet are 'lucky enough' (read rich enough) to own an iPhone. The math is utterly crushing and anyone who ignores it, needs to go to remedial math classes.
No phone left behind makes sense. After that, go ahead and do your sexy iPhone app. But its utterly idiotic to start with the platform which reaches 1/100 the size, and costs 10x more to make. Utterly idiotic. Except yes, if you are a supplier of Apple related goods, then it makes sense to start with iPhone app.
Thank you all for writing
Tomi Ahonen :-)
Posted by: Tomi Ahonen | October 11, 2010 at 01:10 PM
No the dumbest thing you can do is give advice without knowing what someone is trying to achieve.
You like analogies - you're like a doctor prescribing a cure without knowing the patients problem. Reach is not the most important thing and reach is NOT the same as response.
Your fundamental problem is you are focusing on the wrong things with your advice. Time and time again we've seen successful apps, why? Because the idea and execution was spot on. That's what is important, if you get those wrong you'll fail on WHATEVER platform/channel you chose.
Mobile web/SMS/MMS will not save a crap idea. Neither will an app. And that's where you start, with a solid proposition, objectives and execution. Not with how many phones can be reached.
If you honestly think brands spend tens of thousands of pounds creating an application because the head of marketing wets his pants over his new retina display on his new iPhone then that's a awfully naive way of thinking.
Business decisions are backed up by data. Most of the time brands choose to create an iPhone app due to large amounts of mobile traffic coming from iOS. A decision is then made how best to spend the marketing budget based on this information. Its not rocket science why they choose to create apps.
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