Asamblea Constituyente

So your customer doesn’t touch your product every day. Is that any reason to be absent from mobile? You just need to start thinking outside in—think about your customer’s problem. In the case of Clorox, the customer’s problem is not laundry, it’s a stained garment. Clorox manufactured its way into a new moment: the stain moment. What moment can you manufacture? And what context can you use to provide better service in that moment?

In this section, we’ll describe a slew of innovative marketers who gured out how to make themselves useful and earn a moment of their customer’s time. As the author Jay Baer told us, “The better approach to marketing is to be useful. People will treat you differently; they will treat you as they treat their friends. We keep useful.”

Here’s why it pays to be useful.

First, in a crowded world of advertising and media, useful earns you a permanent spot. Advertising is expensive, and it fades. Useful gets you friends, and they spread

word of mouth. Why not have your customers spread your brand for you? In his book

Velocity, Stefan Olander of Nike predicts, “As advertising evolves, it will provide real answers to real questions, not canned information. It will o er interactions and services that satisfy real needs, not blanket persuasions. It will create communities that speak to one another and are not just content with aspirations.”

Since it is permanent, you can build on it. Clorox continually updates its myStain app. You don’t have to pay each year to start over—you can pay to boost the value of what you’ve got. It’s relatively cheap to create an app (at least compared with paying for media—that initial myStain app cost less to build than a single prime-time television ad), so you can start small and work your way up from there.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you can create a customer connection where none existed before. Starbucks already had many of its customers’ emails, and USAA knew all about its customers. But Clorox didn’t have anywhere near that level of customer connection until the app created it. It’s leveraging that connection now; even the R&D group at Clorox wants to know what stains the app users are searching, to know which kind of products to work on next.

Let’s get a look at how a diverse set of companies manufactured moments by thinking bigger and solving their customers’ larger problem.

Outdoorsman and developer Jay Kerr at Columbia Sportswear realized that his customers wouldn’t be interested in an app about outdoor clothing. Their larger problem was surviving in the outdoors. His response: create an app called What Knot To Do. To serve Columbia Sportswear’s customers, the app has to work in places where there’s no mobile connection, like the top of a mountain. Half a million downloads later, Columbia owns knots, the essential tools of the camper, hiker, and kayaker. All it took was one developer’s time and a little PR to manufacture this outdoor moment.

Here’s another delicious example of a company manufacturing a moment for customers. It’s the moment when you drive by a Krispy Kreme store and see the neon “Hot Light” is on—indicating that hot doughnuts have just come o the line. Krispy Kreme’s customers salivate when the Hot Light goes on. But what if you’re too far away to see the light? Just download the app. With the help of a clever design by the integrated marketing agency Barkley, Krispy Kreme set up a system that allowed the same switch in the store that turns on the Hot Light to tell a customer that hot doughnuts just became available in, say, Collingswood, New Jersey. If you’ve downloaded the app and happen to be anywhere near Collingswood, you’ll get a push noti cation. So now that Hot Light can do its marketing work for many miles around. Krispy Kreme CMO Dwayne Chambers has cancelled all of his traditional media buys; as he says, “We need to be careful not to take a brand so simple and make it too complex.” After 450,000 app downloads and double-digit increases in same-store sales, the Hot Light app appears to be doing its job.

It’s not just for doughnuts and clothing. It works in business-to-business settings, too. Cisco is a tech giant that sells routers, servers, switches, and cloud management suites. Of course it owns the moments associated with running that equipment with an entire suite of apps to allow highly mobile techies to remotely manage the company’s

products. It’s got apps that turn data sheets for network equipment into 3D images that allow network engineers to con gure server stacks. But one of Cisco’s most popular mobile apps is the Cisco Binary Game—an app that helps you learn and practice the binary number system. It’s got hundreds of thousands of downloads—a huge number when you consider the relatively small number of networking geeks in the world. For engineers, these apps qualify as entertainment—and entertainment moments are manufactured moments.

What if you’ve got a lot of brands? Couldn’t managing all these mobile applications get out of hand?

That’s the problem that Pete Blackshaw, global head of digital and social media, manages at Nestlé. His facility in Switzerland is the nerve center of the company’s digital acceleration team. In 2012, Nestlé had around 100 apps globally, with each of its many brands managing its own budgets and local agency partners. As Pete puts it, “Mobile is a services layer that wraps around our products. Mobile is the connective tissue.” But the mobile apps were a mishmash of quality and value. Pete set out to standardize elements of Nestlé’s apps, starting with an inventory of existing mobile services that parts of the company had created. He set out to nd and spread best practices. Now Pete brings local brand talent to his headquarters and exposes them to tools and techniques that are most e ective for Nestlé globally, both for mobile and for other types of digital engagement. The company has standardized packaging elements, including QR codes, to jumpstart mobile apps anywhere in the world. His sta has created training, starter kits, and resources to support the brands. Some elements of Nestlé’s mobile apps, like content management systems and analytics, are centralized, while local agencies handle creative and app or campaign development and execution. (We provide more detail on how large companies can best organize for mobile in Chapter 12.)

Apps that manufacture moments for marketing purposes are a lot cheaper than those for loyalty moments because you get to build them from scratch, and they often don’t need to tie back into expensive-to-engineer corporate systems. But if you’re building an app or site like this, you ought to get going quickly. The categories of customer problems are lling up with apps all the time. You don’t want to be on version 1 when your competitor is already delivering version 3.

Now before we go all app-crazy on you, we realize that there are parts of the world where apps aren’t as popular as they are in the US. In Europe, mobile overages and roaming charges have lowered mobile intensity. And in China, the connections in cities can be spotty or slow. In places like this, app downloading isn’t nearly as common as it is in the US (although that may be changing depending on when you read this). Apps for loyalty moments and manufactured moments may not be an option for marketers in these places—and it may not be an option for you, either, depending on the politics at your company. If this describes you, you may need to borrow your mobile moments.