Nokia’s HERE last week announced it plans to acquire Medio Systems, a Seattle-based company that is a pioneer in the emerging field of real-time predictive analytics. I met Medio founder and CTO, Brian Lent, a couple of times in the past few years and have always been impressed by his vision of what analytics would become.
Such an acquisition will help HERE and then Nokia Networks and Technologies deliver more contextualized and personalized experiences by adding smart data to its location intelligence capabilities.
At Forrester, we believe that to embrace the mobile mind shift, companies will have to serve customers in their mobile moments. To do so, they must anticipate their customers’ next likely actions. Already, almost 1 in 4 smartphone users expect their mobile experiences to change based on their location.
According to Nokia, it could, for example, mean delivering individual restaurant recommendations to someone ready for lunch, giving drivers routes that match their driving style based on real-time conditions, or helping businesses personalize their customer offerings.
To be able to deliver these experiences and engage with customers in real time, marketers will have to think about mobile not as yet another digital channel but as a catalyst for business transformation. To do this, Forrester believes they need a business discipline to win in the mobile moment by implementing what we refer to as the IDEA cycle, by:
• Identifying the mobile moments and context.
• Designing the mobile engagement.
• Engineering platforms, process, and people for mobile.
• Analyzing results to monitor performance and optimize outcomes.
• Improving continuously.
Marketers should work closely with their technology counterparts to build systems of engagement as summarized on the graphic below:
Mobile, powered by insight from big data, will drive customer engagement through delightful mobile moments and enable more powerful marketing, not just on mobile but on any channel.
Together with my colleagues Brian Hopkins and Ted Schadler and a few other analysts, I am planning new research on opportunities opening up for marketers at the crossroads of mobile and big data; feel free to contact me if you have a story to tell.
Thomas Husson is a VP and principal analyst serving marketing leadership professionals at Forrester Research. This article originally appearedon the Forrester Research blog.