Whole industries have been and will be transformed overnight. There will be no business sector that will remain untouched by the digital era; this is the experts’ predictions for 2016. The digital revolution has already started, and the big challenge for the traditional industries is to offer the mobile capabilities that consumers request now before the start-ups and big digital companies like Google or Facebook to baffle their plans.
Take Uber, for example, it had a big impact on the taxi market in lots of countries around the globe, just like AirBnB had for accommodation. Now we already have mobile apps available to book a private jet charter to take you to your next meeting across the country or the continent, have a look at Fly Victor App or PrivateFly App. Soon we’ll probably have more and more mobile options to make our lives easier and save precious time. And this should come as no surprise as at the beginning of the new millennium companies like Amazon have reinvented the book industry, Netflix the video rental industry and Apple with its iTunes changed the music industry for all consumers.
During the last few years, the prices of mobile phones and smartphones have dropped dramatically, and this allowed consumers in developing countries and emergent economies to have access to mobility for under 25 dollars (the price of the smartphone). This thing alone brought the mobile internet to billions of people who, up until recently, didn’t even have an internet connection.
Are the traditional companies threatened by the mobile specter? Whenever they feel it or not, they most certainly are.
Although it is quite new, the mobile medium encroaches more and more of the total time people spend in the digital space to the detriment of the now “traditional” online medium. More and more consumers are using the email, chat and social network services on their smartphones as it is easily accessible wherever they might be while leaving the laptop or computer to other more complex activities that haven’t made the transition to mobile yet.
In this ever developing context, the companies should adapt to stay relevant to their consumers in the mobile world, where more and more people spend their time. Hence, the mobile presence has become an imperative no one can ignore or delay.
While the preoccupation with the digital relevance is constantly on the rise, the number of companies paying enough attention to the mobile phenomenon is still small. Many companies have a marketing department with a budget dedicated to digital advertising but most of the times this doesn’t include any action in the mobile area, even if the market penetration of the mobile is so high that even Google started giving penalties to sites that are not optimized for mobile browsing.
Now it is a good time to ask yourself “Are we truly ready to embrace our mobile customers?”, get an answer and then implement an action plan. Because nowadays, if you are not mobile, you don’t exist.