// TRENDWATCH: 'MOBILISATION' RAPIDLY BECOMING A BUSINESS PRIORITY
18.07.10
We knew it would happen...but we didn't necessarily expect it to happen this fast.
Over the last few months, we've been appointed by four different global companies to undertake significant consultancy projects.
All four briefs go well beyond 'communication': at heart, they're about business transformation; about finding new and better ways of doing things that can deliver lasting competitive advantage.
It's in the nature of such assignments that we can't name names: but they span a leading financial services brand; a major car rental company; a highly successful aggregator in the travel sector; and the publisher of some of the UK’s favourite magazines.
This isn't wholly new, of course. Our partners like Coca-Cola and Auto Trader have been thinking and working like this for a while. But whereas they've tended to be the exception, there's now a broader and deeper trend emerging.
At Sponge, we're calling it the 'Third Age of Mobile'.
The first was largely tactical, usually promotional and all about Response; it could be described as the SMS Era.
The second was more genuinely interactive, more focused on Engagement; you could think of it as`the App Era (although it was never just about apps).
The Third Age, we believe, will be when Mobile moves from the fringes to the heart of business. It'll be primarily defined by the development of services and tools that deliver increasingly meaningful value to customers, often at reduced cost to the organisation. Its core characteristic will be individualised relevance, usually within the context of time and place.
In other words, and catalysed by spiralling capability in terms of handset technology, it’ll be the era of Empowerment.
We are indeed living in interesting times…
