A colleague was reading my earlier post about how mobile culture was a key factor in the new Zoove service in the US and posed the question to me:
Why do you think the Asian market has grown faster than ours (Europe)?
Have they had interoperability from day 1?
Was text always cheap there?
More to the point why do you think they have adopted mobile internet and mobile services so much readily than we have?
So – after giving it some thought – here is my point of view…
- Lack of Choice: In China the majority of the population doesn’t have internet access at home. It has always been far easier to put up a single mobile network tower than to run copper to 100,000,000 homes in the middle of a giant rice paddy. And having no other access to the Internet, people quickly learned how to use their mobile phone for this access.
- Mobile E-mail: Japan launched their mobile internet service with mobile e-mail. The majority of messaging in Japan is mobile imap. Consumers appetite for e-mail was quickly realized on their mobile phone. This made the leap to mobile websites much easier. The majority of messaging in Europe was SMS based with no direct connection to mobile Internet.
- Better revenue sharing: The European model doesn’t give enough of the revenue back to the content owner. I-mode was –arguably- more successful in Japan because the best content owners were actually making enough money to market the services themselves. They also had a unified platform to operate from (NTT Docomo I-Mode).
- Single culture. The entire population of Europe – with multiple countries and cultures – approximates the population of China with a single unified culture. When the right model is found it naturally spreads across the entire culture more easily than in Europe. For instance, the Norwegians use phones far differently than the Italians – who use them far differently than the Germans or the English.. etc. etc. etc. This means that there will always be an order of magnitude market factor that will apply to both success and failures in new service launches in a huge single culture ( China, Korea, Japan ) vs. multiple smaller and very distinct cultures such as those here in Europe.
- Sex Sells – and educates! Higher social acceptance of basic instinct marketing ( more acceptable to market sex and adult content ). The same is true in South and Latin American territories. Sex was a huge driver in the days of the VCR – and the Internet. China and Japan and Brazil etc all have a huge culture of adult mobile content. The more conservative Christian cultures in Europe mean there are fewer of these types of services. The fact is that people will learn how to do virtually anything if they can satisfy the base sex instinct – and when they have mastered using the mobile Internet for sex, all the other content types are equally accessible. VCRs were first used for XXX videos – and only later became mainstream for home videos and recording your favourite sitcom
Why has there been a greater adoption of mobile Internet in China, Korea and Japan? It’s a great question and one that I feel very strongly about. For too long MNOs and software vendors have been trying to tout the successes in Asia and Japan mobile services as the baseline as to how and what and why services will grow here in Europe. I have consistently said, “bullocks”.
Show me a service that works well in Sweden and we can talk about it working well in Norway – but not necessarily in Spain or Italy. Show me a service (like MMS and photo messaging) that is huge in Japan and I will contend that it has very little ability to predict how well it will go down here in the UK. (How many British do you see with 4 cameras slung around their necks when they go on holiday?)
But what was the real question?
I think the underlying question of my colleague was one of “How can we achieve greater success of mobile Internet here in Europe?” The answers, if we want to follow a successful model of Asia would be as follows:
Make mobile Internet more ubiquitous and cheaper than fixed line Internet
Turn off SMS and make e-mail accessible only via your mobile
Improve revenue sharing with mobile content owners
Convince everyone across Europe to want and like the same thing
-and/or-
Make all adult content free to everyone when accessed from their mobile…
Consumer preference – it’s a local thing.
1 Comments:
You raise some interesting points. My lack of knowledge of the Asian market makes it hard for me to agree/refute your arguments. The point about the adult market though is one which seems obvious. I’m not sure about ‘our Christian culture’ holding us back though. There seem to be no end of adult services available on mobile internet and despite the hoops that people have to jump through to get the content, they seem to want it.
Just as telling is the success of user generated adult content on 3’s SeeMeTV. When 3 created the service did they imagine that it would be a mobile equivalent of You Been Framed or do you think they knew they would get masses of soft (and hard core!) porn sent to them by users?
I’m not convinced by your final points though about how to make mobile internet use grow. Certainly making browsing free and then pricing content clearly works for 3 I think. The rise of ‘ask & know’ services will also help as do the introduction of services generally (rather than mobile marketing). As consumers get more used to simple interactions with companies via the mobile channel, they get more comfortable with trying more ‘complicated’ WAP based services.
At the moment though, I’m convinced by the argument put forward by Seth Godin that the services that will grow mobile internet use don’t yet exist and that’s partly because the Networks think it’s their job to figure out what consumers want. Perhaps the answer is to follow 3’s example and create the conditions where consumers will tell you what they want and create it themselves…
10:15 AM
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