Tablets - Mobile

You can't throw a dead Blackberry phone at a pundit without hearing somebody talk about how customers are moving to mobile.

Many folks count the iPad as a mobile device.  This is an arbitrary designation, one often made to make mobile look better than it really is.

If you want to see if the iPad is really part of the mobile revolution, take a look at where purchases happen.  Segment customers who buy traditionally via your e-commerce site, customers who buy via a tablet, and customers who buy via a smartphone.  Once customers are segmented, look at the channel used in the very next purchase.

If an iPad customer shops via the iPad on the very next purchase, then you have a customer base making the transition to new devices.  If the iPad customer switches back to old-school e-commerce shopping, then you've got experimentation happening, you don't have a customer base that buys into new technology just yet.

We saw this with e-commerce in the late 1990s ... customers ordered online, then went back to buying via the telephone.  By the early 2000s, customers ordered online and stayed online ... at that point, the mass exodus from the call center was underway.

Simply repeat the work you did a decade a go, this time measuring the shift from traditional e-commerce to tablets/mobile.

Retailers and Tablets

You've probably research Catalog Spree, correct?  Click here to take a peek.

One of the mistakes we're likely to see in the next few years is the "put a catalog on a tablet and you've got multi-channel success" mistake.

Again, we have to look at the data.  Customers who love B2C catalogs are largely age 55+.

Customers who love tablet devices are largely 30-39 years old (yes, I understand, 23 year olds love tablets and 71 year olds sometimes love tablets, I get it).  And, yes, I realize that catalogers will say that we are "multichannel", that because we have a website we're not actually catalogers, and then we'll mention that 33 year olds shop the website, so tablet devices could work.  I get it.



Retail brands and catalog brands are, of course, applying "what we know" to tablet devices.  We did this in the late 1990s, remember CD-ROM?  "We will put the catalog on a CD and put the CD in the mail and the customer will love it!"  Remember?


I'm not saying that a catalog on a tablet device can't work, it certainly can, and in many cases, it will work.


I am saying that we aren't thinking through the problem in an adequate manner.


What problem does a tablet device solve?  How do we use the device to solve the problem?  Does our customer demographic even use tablets?


Odds are that placing a catalog on a tablet device doesn't solve a problem faced by a customer.  There are catalogs in print, there's our website, and now, a third way to buy the exact same item.  We need to solve a customer problem.