• by Lou Casal , November 13, 2013

From a device perspective, nothing is more connected to an individual’s personality than his or her smartphone. It is always at hand and stands ready, next to you while you sleep. The smartphone has a very unique emotional and psychological connection to its user. We may love our tablets, but our smartphones are an extension of our very being. Mental health professionals have even coined a term for the fear of being without your phone: nomophobia -- a condition that impacts 40 percent of the population.

Why does this matter to marketers? Smartphones provide an unprecedented opportunity to connect with customers. However, they also present risks and pitfalls. With such a personal connection, the experience must be spot-on relevant and useful. Regrettably, a marketing disconnect occurs when all devices are lumped together in a “one size fits all” mobile strategy.  

Smartphones and tablets serve different purposes, and even devices within the same class of hardware differ. Marketers succeed when they proactively seek to understand the differences in use and expectations per device type (smartphone vs. tablet), tailor the brand experience and content to the proper context, and deliver value. As a result, marketers should develop distinct, segmented mobile strategies and approaches for smartphones versus tablets while still aiming to deliver a coherent customer experience across all touchpoints.  

Understand the endpoint. Marketers should start by exploring the unique characteristics of smartphones in contrast to tablets and how each type of device is used. Then apply this insight to deliver the most relevant content in ways customers will want to interact with your brand.

One such characteristic is location: understanding where and when a customer uses a tablet versus a smartphone. For example, more than 50 percent of in-store customers use their smartphones to compare prices or even to purchase products. In 2012, Best Buy proclaimed they were going to counterattack showrooming (see it in the store, buy it from Amazon) by beefing up their online efforts and matching prices against Amazon. The sad reality is that an online retailer can consistently win sales from a store with a customer standing inside it.  

So what can brick-and-mortar retailers do? One approach is to develop ways to intercept the Amazon portion of the customer journey and expand the in-store value-add story. In a move similar to the Ionos Flysmart app that leverages a phone's GPS, travelers (within an airport) get useful airport information along with relevant, airport vendor marketing promos. Retailers could also leverage GPS to provide a smartphone-centric experience that offers in-store promos, product recommendations and convenient real-time purchase options. 

In contrast to smartphones, tablets have less of an emotional connection versus a pragmatic one. They are our go-to device to browse, shop, communicate and consume content. According to Forrester Research, tablets are often used within the home and are quickly replacing the laptop as the purchasing platform for many a consumer. And while smartphones outperform tablets in overall revenue, the average sale amount from a tablet is 20 percent higher than phones.

Tablets are increasingly being used in conjunction with the TV, PC and smartphone, essentially becoming a key part of this multi-touch customer experience journey. Since tablets are often used in a relaxed setting such as the home, the experiences need to be informative, entertaining and engaging -- this is where content will rule. The user experience needs to fit the tablet environment and not be an awkward resized experience from a smartphone or a PC. The way to achieve this is by utilizing the tablet's larger real estate, crisp display and other unique attributes. This is where content is consumed -- so it is essential to make it enjoyable and very easy to do business with your brand.

Tailor the experience. Rising customer expectations and increased competition require marketers to optimize mobile experiences to fit the context of the device, situation and user. Tailoring differentiates the brand and delights the customer --  often in subtle ways. Jony Ive, senior VP of design at Apple, indicated that for iOS7 they were developing a flat design environment that will elevate content and use visual techniques like translucency that provides users with a sense of context.

Continuing along this direction, Apple's iPhone product team recognized the need to better understand the context for which iPhones are being used. For instance, the new iPhone 5S has a M7 motion chip that can detect movement so if the phone is in a moving car it can shut down Wi-Fi, and if it is motionless it will limit its network pings. And while the full range of uses for this chip are slowly being realized, one thing is certain: from hardware to operating systems and Apps, the contextual experience bar is quickly rising.

Regrettably, scope, scale and the never-ending tsunami of new devices with new attributes outpace the usefulness of current methods that take a more one-size-fits-all approach. Techniques like Responsive Design, which adapts the layout to the viewing environment, will no longer fully serve our needs. Publishing to mobile is easy. Doing it consistently and contextually well is hard. Moving forward, our methods will need to take into account what people actually want to do on different devices. Simply changing the layout does not actually address customer intent or patterns of use on different devices.

The good news is there are approaches and solutions that can help. To be successful, organizations need to support a clear commitment and level of investment. As Julie Ask and Thomas Husson of Forrester Research clearly state: “Mobile on the cheap is over. . . Implementing the complex technology required to deliver rich mobile engagement requires not just a new vision of how to interact with consumers but also significant cultural changes and investment in infrastructure, staffing and skills.”

However, this is not to suggest that all things mobile must be complex or extremely costly. Just the contrary -- there are non-profits delivering solid mobile experiences that take device context into account. Macmillan Cancer support, a UK-based non-profit, clearly understands that charitable giving can also occur on mobile platforms.  When comparing Macmillan's site displayed in a PC browser vs. a mobile device, the content on mobile becomes much more targeted to contribution call-to-actions.  As a result, this allows them to deliver what is relevant while better connecting with their contributors in a way that makes sense for a given device.

In the end, deliver value. Mobile customers have high expectations. Bad mobile experiences send them to the competition. Two things really matter: consistency and the value a marketer brings to the mobile experience. It is the free app from Esurance that blocks a teen driver’s mobile phone use while the car is in motion. It is the Ikea catalog experience that helps customers find merchandise within the store and also allows them to see, using augmented reality on their smartphones, how a piece of furniture would actually look in their homes.

In a world where perception is reality, consistency binds all the separate opinion-forming customer experiences together. A good example of this is how Mandarin Oriental Hotels leveraged all their high-end visual content from their Web-based interactive properties and extended their concierge level customer experience to the smartphone, providing a consistent experience from PC to Web to smartphone.

Collectively, all experiences enrich the customer's relationship and perception of the brand. When Marvel Entertainment released their free mobile app for the "Avengers" movie, it engaged moviegoers with an impressive experience that included cinematic content, participation in Comic-Con’s Item47 game and more. They essentially extended the movie experience well beyond the big screen to tablets and smartphones. However, depending on the device, the experience will be slightly different.

In the end, marketers who understand how to leverage the differences between smartphones and tablets can better optimize the experience to relate to their customers -- and perhaps they also can become superheroes for their brand and their customers.