• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 15, 2009

"Sorry, I forgot to bring my coupon," I tell the checkout lady at Borders Books.

"Use your thingie," my fiancée blurts. The Borders gal and I both look at her quizzically and with some concern. "The Thing -- your Thing!" my crazed betrothed squeals, worsening her situation by pointing at my pants. Her voice hits a painful pitch when she gets frustrated, so now even the parents in the kids' section at the back of the store are wondering (along with me), "What the hell?'

It takes a few minutes to unwind this one, but it turns out that "thingie" meant my phone, and she was referring to the SMS Borders coupons I had been using for months last year. Just as she doesn't like referring to my ex-wife by name ("that one" usually), my partner has some kind of block against saying "iPhone," and so we get into weird constructions like this in-store embarrassment.

Well, Borders stopped sending me coupons by text months ago, I tell her. "You probably were the only one who used them," the sales clerk quips. "They told us they ended the program." Nobody told me. But I surely miss them. The offers arrived in tandem with the email coupons, so I never had to bother making and bringing a printout to the store. It was always on my... thingie.

The form of the promotion actually followed one of my device's functions. In one of my columns last week I urged marketers to think harder about the basic functionality of the device and try to design campaigns that map against its conversational quality. JWT Media Supervisor Sabrina Galati later reminded me that functionality. even on a basic phone, is wider than conversation. As the Borders program demonstrates, my thingie is also basic, portable data storage that a marketer can leverage.

Galati recalls working for a high-tech client over a year ago who wanted to target tech-savvy males with its HDTV brand. Mobile was a natural part of that mix. But while this audience was advanced and gadgety enough to have Web-enabled phones, that wasn't where consumers were actively researching the TV category. They were at CNet, where the client sponsored a shopping aisle. What mobile extension makes sense here? "We took a step back," Galati says. "Many people throw banners and other things up there, and I don't see the value in that yet. We can run WAP banners, but what good would that do? We know they are researching at CNet. Are they really going to the WAP version of CNet? We don't know."

So instead the client created a rich-media ad on CNet that prompted interested users to text in a short code to get model details and specs for that TV. Consumers could bring the information into a showroom. The program produced a good response of clearly interested users. At the time, the client did not deploy back-end metrics to measure sales conversions -- but obviously anyone engaged enough to have specs sent to his phone was narrowing down his consideration set. The phone simply makes a bit more convenient something the user probably would do anyway, print the specs and bring them to the store. The tactile quality of the interaction engages the user in a different way from other media, and the program recognizes that even the most basic phone is a portable printer.

This simple, early test of function-based mobile promotion is a good reminder to marketers as we move into an iPhone, or thingie-fueled, mobile Web world where we are tempted to replicate Internet tactics. As Galati points out, one of the things marketers need to know more about through research is how their audiences engage the devices. "There needs to be a study to see how specific targets are interacting with their phones. They interact very differently," she says.

This is a point well taken. At some point we have to evolve beyond thinking of mobile as some kind of unified experience or platform. This device is so personal, it is hard to imagine that even a few use cases and patterns of interaction account for it.

In other words, we aren't just targeting eyeballs on this device. We are targeting a range of behaviors . And even now, most of us haven't decided how much we want the technology to be a phone, a browser, a note-passer, or an image-maker. The consumer is a moving target because the desired functionality is evolving, and even usage is likely to fragment into a number of different styles that demand different marketing techniques. My fiancée is right after all. It is still a thingie.