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| Motti Kushnir |
Motti Kushnir, CMO at Telmap, on if you want to win it, you have to localise it...
In today’s global village atmosphere, it’s easy to think that we are all citizens of the world and forget that when it comes to running our day to day lives, we are all local creatures. While we all interact on a daily basis with consumer brands and professional and social connections around the world, at the end of the day, most of our daily interactions are local, in our country, in our city, in our neighbourhood.
These days we make a lot of our interactions, both socially and professionally, through a variety of channels, whether it’s online, on the phone, in the mail, or face to face. But many of us are still looking to interact in the most local way possible; we want the person on the other side to speak our language, understand our needs and our culture, no matter which channel we chose to communicate through.
Evolution of mobile
Mobile services in recent years have expanded to include a full array of services that go beyond voice, such as messaging, browsing, video, social networking and much more. The evolution of mobile technologies, combined with human thirst to interact and consume information locally, made it clear that the proliferation of mobile location-based services is just around the corner.
Location and localisation go hand in hand. In order for the information we consume to be truly useful and relevant for us, it must be truly local. If I am, for example, looking for a spring festival to attend this weekend, I really couldn’t care less about such a festival happening somewhere else in Europe, or even on the other side of my own country. I want to know what is happening around my vicinity, in what I define as my vicinity.
If I have a few free hours between meetings, and decide to catch a movie, I want to get information on what’s playing, where and at what time, in a radius that’s relevant for the timeframe that I have available (don’t want to travel two hours to the cinema). Pan European, Pan American, and global information wouldn’t work here, as I want to extract information only on what I can find that’s happening in my own nearby environment.
Widget time
A special location-enabled widget that notifies me when I enter the congestion zone in London and enables in-application, one-click payment of the congestion zone toll, is extremely relevant to a Londoner, but is hardly relevant to a New Yorker, who would be interested for example in a great location-aware Zagat widget that will make it easy for her to choose, suggest, share and navigate to a nearby top rated restaurant for a client lunch.
‘One size fits all’ solutions like Google’s and Nokia’s aim at providing an identical solution all over the world; in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas, both North America and Latin America. Tey these solutions cannot provide a fully personalised and localised user experience. In order to provide this level of experience the solution should take into account specific geographical and cultural characteristics of each individual market, giving me access to relevant local content that’s relevant to my immediate living environment.
Operators are the mobile experts, they are constantly launching new mobile services, learning our preferences and what we consider the ultimate user experience. They are big enough, yet local enough to provide us with the solution that can really answer our needs, and the cherry on the top of the cake is that more and more of them are willing to do this for free, basically eliminating the only real advantage of the one size fits all solution providers out there.
Operators do care
Operators over the years have proved that they care about the quality of service they provide or endorse, as it directly reflects on their brand. This, combined with their need to compete on end user’s loyalty and share of wallet can ensure they will work hard on identifying those location-based solutions and content providers, as well as local brands, which are best in their field, have proven updates and maintenance processes, as well as extensive local knowledge and maximal coverage of their respective markets. This will enable operators to provide end users with a truly differentiated product; differentiated through localisation.
The result would be a convenient, best in class, must have, can’t live without service that’s superior to anything else out there; a service that’s readily available right on our handsets, making our on the go lives easier. Plus, it is delivered by a trusted provider that the consumer has an established, long term relationship with.
Telmap stands at the forefront of today’s fast growing market for mobile search, mapping and navigation solutions. The Company has a solid reputation and proven track record for providing innovative mobile LBS solutions that open new business opportunities and revenue streams for mobile operators. www.telmap .com