White paper: Giving product launches impact With Mobile Apps

Recently I led two significant purchases for our household. The first was the quest for a super thin 60-inch flat TV screen. The second expedition resulted in an overcrowded driveway and my sixteen-year-old daughter behind the wheel of a shiny new car.

Compelling advertising gave us a short list of preferred brands to start with. We made our way to several retailers and engaged with sales reps to help us with our final decisions. During this, however, something significant happened, quite unlike our previous family shopping expeditions. My sixteen-year-old began leading our decision-making by constantly accessing product information from a variety of product applications and from sites such as myproductadvisor.com and Edmonds, all via her iPhone. This unexpectedly put us in control as we rapidly grew more knowledgeable about the products we were shopping for than the reps with whom we consulted. In the end we walked away from a number of original possibilities and made an independent purchase despite the efforts of the sales reps we met.

It did not have to end that way. According to McKinsey & Company, "Research indicates that 40 percent of customers remain open to persuasion once they enter the store. Retailers who fail to have knowledgeable staff on hand to help are losing sale after potential sale."

Evidently, my personal experience using mobile shopping applications - or apps - while shopping is not unique. Many global brands are rushing to develop mobile apps as the habit of leveraging smart phones while shopping is becoming increasingly common among consumers. Today, it's hard to imagine standing at a street corner or in an airport without seeing hundreds of people hunched over their iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone surfing the web or texting away. On September 29, 2010 Google CEO, Eric Schmidt said that he believes mobile search activity and revenue will eventually be bigger than desktop search. Forrester Research estimates that over 2 billion smart phones will be in circulation by 2012 world-wide. Samsung estimates that its smart phone sales will double every 8 to 12 months. The age of mobility is surely in full bloom.

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