We live in an age where more and more of our physical lives take place in cyberspace. Whether we like it or not, our digital shadows are narrating our lives, telling stories about who we are and what we want. We are generating more data, often invisible to us, but not to the devices in the places we walk through, the transport we take or the people with an interest in such matters. Mobility and big data are destined for an interesting fusion.
Data, Data Everywhere
Technically speaking, mobile big data isn’t that different from data created using the traditional web. The difference is that consumers are just producing more of it as they shift their behaviour to digital, leaving a trail of data documenting their movements and actions. The big data that originates in mobile big data can originate from your smartphone itself, from browser activity, from apps you have downloaded whether they are open or not, and even from the communications networks you pass through. Even knowing that a person has a more recent model of an iPhone or that they are carrying both an iPhone and iPad can tell you something valuable about that person – they have certain levels of disposable income; they are multiscreen; they may have certain age profiles; they may use the phone to message friends, to social network and ‘check in’, but then move to their tablet to browse the web for other offers, to download some technical details about a product and eventually move back to their mobile to buy the product in store.
Even when we are ostensibly not using our phones, we are still creating reams of data. Figures from the landmark annual Cisco report (the Cisco Visual Networking Index, now treated as the benchmark for these trends) indicate that global mobile data traffic just from handhelds will increase by a factor of 26 by 2015, and mobile-connected tablets on their own will generate as much traffic in 2015 as the entire global mobile network did in 2010.
Let’s look at why. Mobile devices, of course, take and make your calls, texts, email, social media – but they also ‘sense’ you (and your environment). As you walk around your city centres, you are also being observed by closed-circuit television (CCTV) and by Internet Protocol (IP). And these are all perspectives that firms will capture and use, probably sooner rather than later: how long did that customer linger at a particular display, did they turn left or right afterwards, did the target demographic for the promotion swipe to pay or use cash, and so on. This is the promise of new iBeacon devices from Apple and the new Estimote devices on Android. PayPal has an in-store Beacon payment system; Facebook had an ill-fated Beacon product that told others when you bought something. So lots of beacons but not so much light so far.
Helping Mr and Mrs Customer
Location data is an essential component of mobile big data and is arguably the primary data type that differentiates mobile from web-based big data. Location data will completely transform the mobile advertising industry. The ability to deliver real- time hyper-local, targeted messages and marketing offerings represents a potentially momentous evolution in marketing and services development. The recent uplift in Facebook’s share price is a reflection of the perception that they have ‘cracked’ mobile advertising. Similarly, Twitter is seen as the world’s mobile pulse of real-time news.
Consider a customer’s journey through a shop. Can the retailers use location data to deliver a better set of in-store experiences for the customer? Is there a way that retailers can now help the customer check out faster or shorten their journey around a store? They might value that a lot; a way to do a regular task 10 or 20 per cent faster could be a big benefit to customers, one they’d pay for. If you want inspiring examples, look to Nike+ or the FitBit; the health and fitness sector’s use of mobility devices to track people’s movements and help them manage their own health is amazing – and viewed as a lot less ‘Big Brother’ than ‘Helping Mr & Mrs Customer’. It is helping them by capturing mobile data that would never have been captured before, comparing it with that from similar people (social filtering), and then making inferences about performance. The more data that is captured (food intake, sleep, moods) the better the quality of the inferences.
Huge Volume and Huge Opportunity
So this is where marketing is right now, trying to engage with this revolution of mobile and with all the next contexts it generates. Most commentators now accept that the movie Minority Report not only imagined a future interaction paradigm, but that the completeness of its rendering also helped bring it into the world. We can see it today in high street stores such as Burberry London. The recent movie Her may usher in a similar vision for intelligent mobile interaction. For those who follow Apple and Google it is certainly ‘all about their mobile strategy’.
However, many of us haven’t figured out yet what questions to ask of big data. I suggest that you ask the most basic question of all: how will it help the customer?
The mobile component of big data has to become the basic raw material for good, helpful customer service. It has to be transformed into something that helps your customers make better decisions, secure better value or in some way add value to your relationship with them. All channel competition runs on data, and the all channel communications that supports this strategy is predominantly built upon mobile data.
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