Our Blog Posts

The New Target.com and More

Molly.Patterson@vmbc.com — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:53:57 Z

On August 23rd, Target re-launched their website and if you haven't taken a look at it, you are really missing out! It's simple, intuitive and customized to each individual user. I have always loved shopping at Target but in the past five years, they have really become the leaders in the industry, not only by being one of the first companies to have celebrity designers, but also in the interactive space. Their goal of achieving the best e-commerce experience for all their customers across all platforms is something that VMBC truly believes in. What their press release failed to mention was that they also upgraded all applications on their mobile platforms to match the experience on their website. The Target iPad home page is one of my favorite screens!

As far as full on integration between all channels, Target has always been one of the leaders and at VMBC, we are continuously impressed by their emphasis not only on an incredible e-commerce experience but also on mobile commerce and getting customers the information they want, where they want it whether it be through email, SMS, MMS, or through a mobile application.

Bottom line, Target, I love you.

Near Field Communication (NFC), and the questions it brings to Retailers

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:54:43 Z

The critical question facing retailers right now is how to gauge the timing for finding the sweet spot in terms of making an investment in NFC technology: early entrants will pay more for the requisite hardware, with the hope of creating a legitimate point of difference in the consumer’s mind and positioning their store as a friendlier and smarter place to shop; late entries will enjoy the cost efficiencies of cheaper hardware, but will also miss out on a rare opportunity to present their clientele with something genuinely new and different in the retail space.

We believe there will be a critical mass of NFC-enabled consumers in the next 12-18 months. As a result, now is the time to start understanding and budgeting for this hardware upgrade, with an eye on being NFC-compatible by the 2012 Holiday season. Wait much longer than that, and you’ll start to feel like the store with a “Cash only” sign on their register.

From the consumer perspective, a different set of opportunities emerge. One result of this unprecedented aggregation of processing, transmission, access and system fees into a single pot is going to be a massive sales and marketing effort that, like most massive sales and marketing efforts, will oversimplify the options and may encourage consumers to make uninformed choices.

But remember that NFC is nothing more than the handshake in the transaction; it doesn’t actually do any of the processing work. So as we design NFC systems for our partners, we see one critical challenge being finding ways to maintain a truly flexible payment system, one that allows each individual consumer to make purchase decisions in whatever way they’re already comfortable. The average American carries four different credit cards, and uses them in four different ways. Any system that seeks wide acceptance must allow the customer to maintain control over their spending patterns.

For example, thinking as both a mobile professional and a consumer, what will work for you:

Do you want to pay by simply tapping the device or inserting the extra security of texting payment verification?
Where is the money coming from: do you want payments tacked onto your phone bill or some type of “mobile account” that is shielded from your checking account or just withdrawn directly from your bank account, like a debit card?
What is it you’ll be using: do you want a mobile version of your existing cards, or one new mobile supercard designed just for this purpose?
How important is the ability to meld commerce with coupons and discounts? Do you need a system that, in addition to processing a payment, automatically tracks and applies earned discounts? Or should the act of paying remain separate?

To the extent we all get ahead of these questions now, our clients and their customers will benefit down the road.

NFC and how it will Affect Retailers

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:11:35 Z

If you didn't read our first NFC post, What is NFC, and Why do you care?, take a moment to read through it, and then come back to this post to learn about how NFC will affect retailers.

What is NFC and Why Do You Care?

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:07:15 Z

Despite all the stunning projections for how big the market for mobile transactions will grow over the next several years, a simple uniform system for purchasing via the handset has remained a significant roadblock. But with the growing acceptance of a technology called NFC as the single technical standard for processing mobile payments, mobile commerce seems to have hit its tipping point this year.

NFC, or Near Field Communications, is a technology that allows for short-wave wireless communication back and forth between two NFC sensors placed near each other. These sensors can be embedded anywhere, including handsets and retail terminals, creating a way to transfer data (like credit card numbers) between devices. As a result, any information on your phone (like credit card data) can be accessed without having to ever touch the actual card. G+ has created a great mobile payment infographic detailing the process, which you should take a look at.

Adopting the NFC standard has allowed handset manufacturers to safely invest in building NFC technology right into their devices. Just as critically, it has allowed retailers to invest in checkout terminals that can process NFC payments. Google’s Eric Schmidt recently estimated that one-third of retail terminals will be NFC-friendly within twelve months.

So while there are a host of “like-NFC” technologies being developed, solutions that seek to provide the same consumer benefit without the requisite NFC hardware, these have largely been driven by short-term needs. As a result, most analysts believe that in the near future, NFC will be seen as the universal standard: Yankee Group estimates the number of NFC-enabled phones worldwide will grow from 7 million this year to 203 million in 2015, and the Juniper Group is even more optimistic, putting the number at 300 million by 2014.

A pretty powerful, albeit not exactly cooperative, set of companies want to influence the ways your phone will replace most of what’s in your wallet (including your credit cards, debit cards, ID and loyalty cards). Some, like Google and Paypal, see the opportunity to create a massive and ongoing revenue stream. Others, including the banks and credit card providers, just want to hold onto what they already have.

Because of the money involved, most conversations about NFC technology have focused on its use as a payment tool. But NFC technologies are not simply a means to buy and sell things more efficiently. Imagine everything you carry with you and you start to see how the idea of the mobile wallet impacts loyalty programs, couponing, POS and virtually every other aspect of the retail sales process.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore the far-reaching impact NFC technology will have on our retail clients. And on Friday, we’ll look at the technology from a consumer perspective.

Spend Time on Facebook, Money on Mobile

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:14:56 Z

I was reading a research piece this week detailing how smartphone users in the U.S. are now spending more time engaged with mobile apps than they do with desktop and mobile web browsing combined. This is almost double the amount of time they spent on apps a year ago.

When you dig a little deeper into the research, you see that almost half that time on apps was spent playing games, and that 43% was spent on social networking (basically twice the time a web browser is pointed to Facebook). So, while this study alone cannot be read as the death knell for web-based engagement, taken together with Gartner’s estimate that ad sales on the mobile platform will double this year, to $3.3B, and Forrester’s projection that M-Commerce will experience a compound growth rate of almost 40% a year over the next five years, you see a fundamental shift in behavior and a world moving inexorably toward a place where mobile is a brand’s primary marketing platform.

Then there was the news this week that Taco Bell offered free tacos to all 6 million of their Facebook friends and only 3% responded. And the report that a number of early Facebook employees are quitting specifically so they can cash out their otherwise-restricted options now, for fear of another bubble.

Now, given that we at VMBC spend our days turning our clients’ mobile cost centers into profit centers, we’re a little biased. Nevertheless, it all still makes me wonder how anyone continues to invest hard dollars into social media marketing versus spending to direct and immediate sales on the mobile platform. Don’t get me wrong, what Facebook is, and does, is literally awesome.

But what Facebook does not do is deliver a reliable ROI for advertisers.

There are several key reasons for this, as we see it:

1. Liking you is not the same thing as caring about you.
Facebook has set the bar for customer “belonging” so low that it’s impossible to tell who really cares about you and who just clicked a box. It may be that of the 6 million people who Like Taco Bell, only 180,000 are genuine brand evangelists, and so the brand did a great job reaching them. Or it may be that you can’t expect a Facebook follower to jump through any sort of hoop (like printing a coupon and actually going into your store) for you.

2. I am not on Facebook to buy stuff.
There are a lot of reasons I go to Facebook. None of them have anything to do with retail transactions. And the fact that my friends like Starbucks, Coke, Oreos or Skittles (the four biggest brands on Facebook) does not mean that I will buy more of these brands; it just means they ran a more effective campaign to get my friends to click a button. To be more specific: I am not on Facebook to be sold to. Please stop trying.

3. You can’t replicate mobile anywhere but on mobile.
Mobile is a platform: always on, always present, knows where you are and where you want to go. Behavior is instantly trackable, and easily assigned to an investment. Facebook is an activity. One that makes perfect sense for mobile, by the way; we were happy to see that they are finally going to launch an iPad app. But it’s an activity that is at least a couple steps removed from the process of selling and buying.

All of which is why we continue to tell our clients: you can spend your time on Facebook, but spend your money on mobile.

A recap of the MMA Forum, NYC

Molly.Patterson@vmbc.com — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:05:44 Z

Hi y'all! My name is Molly and I am the Manager of Customer Experience at VMBC. Since one the main aspects of my job is overseeing all of VMBC’s clients and making sure their mobile programs are on track and continuing to grow, it is my job to go out and check out everything that is going on in the mobile marketing world. Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) forum in New York City. I had a great time and it just reaffirmed what vmbc has been saying for many years, everything is moving to your mobile phone. Some of the statistics that were presented were just unbelievable. For example, there are 74 million U.S. mobile shoppers out there and mobile shopping revenue is set to reach NINE billion in 2011. I think those statistics speak for themselves!

Some of the other interesting products and technologies I saw at MMA were SnapTags and Text to buy vending machines. SnapTags are similar to QR codes in that you have an application where you take a picture of the SnapTag and then you are linked to content, coupons, etc. But the best part about a SnapTag is that you can put your logo on the tag which makes it much more aesthetically pleasing. Coca Cola has launched a text to buy vending machine in Europe and they brought an example to show to us! You just text in BuyCoke1 to a short code and when you get a text back, you just press what you want on the vending machine and it’s automatically charged to your phone bill. No wallet needed! They are working with the carriers to make it available in the U.S. but it’s unavailable right now!

All in all, I had a great time at MMA, saw some interesting new products in the mobile world, and gathered some great data about where mobile will be in the next one, five and ten years!

- Molly Patterson

Location Based SMS Now Available

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:34:51 Z

As I mentioned briefly last week, we had an outstanding time at CRMC last week. A lot of great speakers and really interesting ideas. We were pleased to host a well-attended roundtable discussion on the future of Location Based Services (LBS) on the mobile platform.

This is an area that we are spending more and more time focusing on for our retail clients. And it was great to see the reaction to the unveiling of our proprietary LBS SMS 2.0 platform, which has redefined the boundaries for LBS. LBS 2.0 will allow clients to push location-based offers to opted-in customers on an automatic, ongoing basis, regardless of phone or carrier. No phone application, no internet connectivity, no check-in and no short code.

It’s something we’ve been working on for a long time and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let our clients start taking advantage of the possibilities.

But the most exciting thing we experienced all week wasn’t a product or service, but an attitude. In conversation after conversation, we saw the potential for a new type of collaboration with people seeking out partnerships aligning creative companies working in related fields on the same types of challenges we face.

In the past these might have been companies you saw as a competitor, but now we understand them to be potential partners, people working in their space to create new ideas and new products in the same way we are.

We believe that in the future, true innovation will come from our ability to find like minds in related fields, working together to create new solutions to the challenges all our clients face.

In spite of all the proclamations and statistics about how fast the mobile industry has grown, how far we have come in how little time, we are still at the very start. And from here we can see that the new solutions will emerge from the most unexpected corners. In coming together, we can create something truly special: a new idea, a new path, allowing all of our clients to grow and thrive in the days ahead.

Apple iOS and how it will affect Apps

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:14:51 Z

We’ve just returned from a fantastic week at the CRMC Show in Chicago, one of our favorite shows of the year. The most exciting aspect of the show for us this year was finding partners with whom we can share ideas, share innovations and share clients to create completely new solutions in the mobile space. We’ll talk more about our experiences at CRMC next week, but right now, I have Apple on the brain.

Reading about Apple’s unveiling of iOS 5 last week, I was struck by how dire and fatalistic the conversations were about the third-party apps whose functionality is now being integrated into the OS.

In short, the thinking goes, if Apple had added an OS feature that broadly does what your app does, your app is now dead. Period. Forget about loyalty, forget about innovation, forget about you.

People love Boxcar, but that love won’t be enough to keep them using it once iOS 5’s Notifications window does the same basic thing. Ditto for Camera+, Instapaper, Don’t Forget the Milk and at least a dozen other apps that make your life easier.

In other cases, iOS 5 may serve as the tipping point for a competitive shift already underway. Couple the file transfer and storage features of iOS5’s iCloud with yousendit’s announcement last month that they now have over 30MM unique users, and you have to wonder what Dropbox’s future looks like.

So we seem to be left with a situation where, even if the integrated functionality in iOS isn’t markedly better, the sheer ease of use that comes with being baked in means that the truly innovative apps will quickly start to gather dust.

Now, I’m not sure this is completely true. But it’s true enough that if you are in the business of finding more engaging and compelling ways to bring value on the mobile platform, you have to wonder how to avoid your investment and your business being consigned to the scrapheap the morning after next year’s WWDC.

Here are some of the ways we’re doing it:

1. Never Forget: If You Don’t Own The Data, You Don’t Own Anything
We are currently developing a new app for one of our partners, a national theater chain. Last week, an Apple patent regarding movie-ticketing data was unearthed. Apple loves the spaces where they have access to free content, and their only challenge is presenting it in a more accessible format. So going up against Fandango, et al, makes perfect sense.

This leaves is with a choice: we can create a great app that does what all the other movie apps do. Or we can create something that frames the value proposition around benefits unique to our partner. So even if Apple does ultimately launch their own movie-ticketing tool, our partner’s customers will still have tangible reasons to come to the branded app first.

Features, functions, bright and shiny objects in your app are great. But functionality is not loyalty.

2. Keep Raising The Bar
If you look at the bulk of apps heading to life-support thanks to iOS 5, you’ll find some great ideas that launched well, enjoyed minor upgrades along the way and have largely continued to do exactly what they set out to do at launch. That makes for a really easy target for Apple to shoot at.

Instead, move your target. Continue to evolve your apps, think like the people who want to kill you and figure out what the next killer app within your app looks like. Earn your users’ trust every day by clearly showing that you’re not resting ion anything. Sounds simple, sounds obvious. But there are a lot of great apps that you’ll be deleting off your iPhone in the next year because they failed to do it.

3. Play in the Niches
Apple is focused on the big, broad solutions: messaging, browsing, photos, to-do lists. So don’t go there. Our clients tend to need an array of small custom solutions in the work we do for them. Focusing on their immediate business demands allows us to create solutions that move our clients’ business forward without investing in apps today that will be moot tomorrow.

If you’re successful, you’ll still grow and Apple will still incorporate your ideas into a future iOS, but at least it’ll extend your lifecycle along the way.

4. Plan For The Worst
According to Apple, there are over 200 new features baked into iOS 5. 200 features that, we can assume, will address the 200 most common and most requested tools and functions currently met by third-party apps. And each of them will not only launch with ubiquity, but they will integrate into the OS more invisibly and fluidly than anything you could ever hope to design.

So, in the end, if you fail to focus on loyalty, fail to keep creating new things to love within the app, and fail to build from small, ownable core groups, you will lose. And the more successful you are, the faster you’ll be in Apple’s sights. Just make sure you know what’s coming next. And start addressing it now. After all, you are the Innovator here.

Welcome to the new VMBC!

Jesse.Crowe@vmbc.com — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:30:40 Z

Hello and welcome to the VMBC.com blog; a continuously evolving DRAFT of thoughts and words we dabble in when we are not delivering important initiatives for a number of very brilliant and creative strategists we are fortunate enough to call “our clients”. In future posts, I will share more details as to where we are investing our development efforts to enable our clients in this exploding mobile revolution. It is a fact; the mobilization of enterprises will be the most important marketing and operations initiative over the next five years. But for this post, I want to jump on the soapbox a little bit and share our background and capabilities for mobile enablement and meaningful customer engagement.

For twelve years our team has specialized in providing new media solutions for Fortune 1000 clients. We facilitate the enablement and adoption of cutting edge marketing and communication technologies that connect and engage customers in a personal way. But we don’t just deliver the technology; we help build the strategic plan that ensures the success and monetization of the new customer engagement.

To deliver on this promise, we need to make what’s hard to do; look and feel easy for customers. Thankfully, innovation is a VMBC trademark and our development track record has aligned with the rapid advancement in communication technologies: web, mobile web, mobile messaging, mobile applications, mobile payments, social media and the like. Our client’s success is directly tied to our ability to continuously provide new and relevant product offerings. As technology, marketing innovation, social interactions and device adoption progresses, so must we. Our laser focus on product and strategy innovation adds to our credibility by making our clients more profitable and their brands more relevant.

Innovation however, does not rest.

Innovation is what enabled one of our clients to grow a division from start-up to a multi-billion dollar valuation in less than three years. Innovation is what delivered a new location based messaging technology and created an application that launched at number one in the app store. Achieving such performance for our clients requires a strategic approach to the business opportunity and most importantly, buy-in at senior levels in the organization. Ensuring superior performance also requires us to connect “likes” to revenue and to be adept at rapid and efficient implementations that create 'unfair' competitive advantages. But competitive advantages disappear quickly, so we also commit to constantly creating new ones that delight our clients and engage their customers.

If you have spoken with our clients or witnessed their performance, it is clear that enabling, delivering, and driving incremental ROI is what we do. We do our best work when we are not the smartest person in the room. We do our best work when we listen to our clients...and to their customers. We also love a challenge, the bigger the better. There is an old saying that goes like this; ”If you want to get something done...get a busy person to do it". Our clients know that if they want something done, they give us the opportunity to do it. We are busy, we are growing and we get it done.

Self-promotion of VMBC is done in our free time and (in this case) is relegated to a late night effort. We think of ourselves as an “old school” business that grows our revenue by achieving breakthrough results for our clients. It is my firm belief that great things happen to companies who take really good care of their customers (I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs). We are blessed in that we have been able to grow rapidly and are now hiring brilliant people who love tech, are digitally literate and do not comprehend the word failure. Success means we need new recruits and they need to know a little about the team they will be joining – so here we are. Please feel free to join in the discussion; we’d love to hear from you.

BTW; if you are still reading this – thanks.

Future posts = (less self-promotion) + (more usable content)

You will also be seeing contributions from our people, the true drivers of our success. I’m proud to lead a team of entrepreneurs and innovators who have found a place to thrive here at VMBC. We will all be focused on a myriad of topics; social transformation, new technology developments, emerging mobile technologies, disruptive marketing strategy development, mobile marketing strategy creation, social CRM, aapl, goog, and anything else that interests us…and hopefully, you.

If you think you could find a home here…send your resumes directly to me.

Jesse Crowe
jesse.crowe@vmbc.com

Welcome!

paula@dunamys.com — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 03:11:33 Z

... to the new VMBC.COM!