• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, April 3, 2014

Mobile consumers are on a continuing journey as they shop.

This point kept coming up during the course of numerous presentations and discussions at the MediaPost OMMA Mobile Europe conference in London yesterday.

While I’ve written quite a bit about the new path to purchase (The Mobile Shopping Life Cycle) here in the past, there were some insightful takes on what marketers in Europe are facing in this pursuit.

Three challenges for marketers attempting to reach customers during their journey are talent, media schedules and that mobile is complicated, said High Bishop, chairman of MRM Meteorite.

“It’s about understanding pain points in the customer journey,” said Peter Sells, the head of mobile at Havas EHS.

Several speakers pointed out that mobile innovation is leaps ahead of simply creating an app or mobile website.

“Every mobile discussion with a client always turns to an organizational change strategy,” said Ilicco Elia, head of mobile at DigitasLBI.

Jide Sobo, head of mobile at MEC, had another suggestion for how agencies should approach brands looking to do anything in mobile: “Ditch the word mobile and talk about strategy.”

“The key is if the consumer is in control,” said Marketa Mach, a digital consultant and former head of digital for Apple in EMEA. From the consumer viewpoint, she suggested that the issue involves managing the volume of interactions.

“It’s about understanding the value of the touch point,” said Frederic Joseph, CEO of Performics EMEA.

Gustaf Sahlman, CEO of Expertmaker, sees the value in the data collected from consumers on location. “The more data a company gets, the better the service they can provide,” he said.

Uyet Tieu, co-founder of Rumble, cautioned about what she called “integration fatigue,” one of interesting phrases from the show.

She described it as the process of companies trying a new mobile technology that looks promising to find months later that it doesn’t properly mesh with a company’s customers’ needs and then moves to another attempted integration. She suggested that continued integration can detract from innovation.

The mobile view from London didn’t sound all that different from what we see happening in other regions.

It is a monstrously big opportunity with all the inherent challenges that go along with it.