This year, mobile becomes a marketing discipline or practice in overall ad strategies, rather than an application in a campaign or on a handset or tablet, according to the white paper "Upward Mobility: Developing an Effective Mobile Shopper Marketing Strategy" that Augme will release this week.
Sitting on the front line in campaign planning sessions with consumer product goods companies like Johnson & Johnson in 2010 reveals that many strategies were based on applications or QR codes for specific products, according to David Apple, CMO of Augme. That changes this year, he says, as more consumers use mobile devices to advance consumption, knowledge and capabilities about products and services with or without assistance from the brand.
The U.S. remains far behind other countries around the world when it comes to integrating mobile tools for data transfer and m-commerce. Marketers, however, will be forced to look at mobile devices as an agnostic tool -- a connection to a campaign rather than an application, as slightly more than half -- 51% -- of the U.S. population will have a smartphone by the end of 2011, estimates Augme, citing Nielsen statistics.
Market research firm IHS iSuppli estimates global smartphone unit shipments will rise from 288 million in 2010 to 651 million in 2014.
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