If 2011 was the year when mobile grew in terms of adoption, 2012 will be the year when it attains rapid maturation, says one mCommerce pundit.
In a guest editorial at Forbes, John Caron, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Modiv Media, a mobile shopper marketing company, has some definite opinions and studied insights about the growth of mobile commerce in 2012. He sees it as a year of “convergence and context.”
Caron defines convergence as a time when “bricks and mobile finally integrate to provide a holistic shopping experience” within the confines of the physical store.
Context, he says, is when mobile “couponing, offers, location, check-ins, etc. become personalized to the individual shopper.” It is the combination of those two trends that retailers need to understand in order to reinvigorate in-store shopping.
This is precisely what Shopkick is doing with its mobile application. It knows when you cross the store’s threshold and provides the personalized experience that Caron prizes so highly he refers to it as “transformational.”
Caron sees several benefits accruing from the incorporation of these trends among retailers that include saving shoppers both time and money, while providing a truly personalized, seamless shopping experience within the store..
He delineates between mobile-enabled e-commerce, which he says is nothing more than transacting a sale on an e-commerce site via a mobile device and full mobile commerce, which is “the ability to purchase physical goods in the store via an app that interacts with the store’s point-of-sale system.” He says that 90% of what we refer to as mobile commerce really fits within the framework of the former.
In Caron’s mind, true mobile commerce is the amalgamation of brick-and-mortar and digital technology. Everything else falls outside that category. In 2012, according to Caron the handwriting is on the wall. He says stores that embrace this methodology will thrive, while that who don’t will continue to be “showrooms and warehouses for mobile apps that have displaced them.”
