All about building an app

Or not.

This isn't meant to be a click bait article, the title being definitely linked to the content here. Conversations around, "We are going digital. Building an app," always leave me thinking, if not flummoxed. Is building an app the answer to the problem of digital? Is digital a problem, a problem solver, or simply a channel to access the consumer and make life easy for them, like any other channel?

Before we embark on a journey of digital, let alone app building, all of us product and business builders need to take a step back, and ask ourselves, "What are the needs of our Target Group (TG)?"

First principles, really. Like my Professor of Consumer Behaviour from B-School would put it, "Define the consumer's needs. Everything else will fall in place automatically."

1. Ease of access to what they need, a good understanding and demonstration of how the product / service they are buying will work, secured transactions, on time and high quality delivery, post purchase servicing, very good value for money - our consumer could be looking for any of these, or in many cases, all of these.
2. Once we get the answer to that question out of the way, we can get to the "How will we solve their needs?" question. In a country of over 1.2B people, 75%+ still solve for their daily needs through traditional means (read physical purchases). If that forms a significant part of our TG, simply going digital is not going to increase the consumer's access to our products. Maybe, assisted selling and better distribution are the answers there.
3. What about the other 25%? Let's assume for a minute that ALL of them are comfortable with buying what we are selling online (taking a cue from e-commerce success stories). And, that we have a COD work-around for the guys who aren't comfortable paying online. And, more importantly, that they all have access to good internet. That only solves for the 'digital' question.
4. What about the app? Do they have an appetite to download an app? How big? Or small? Or do they just want a m-site to complete transactions?
5. Finally, we can think about whether there is enough critical mass for an iOS app, or our TG consists mostly of Android users.

While an app is the holy grail answer to a business's quest for data on the consumer, it isn't always the answer the customer's needs.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way represent the views of anyone else including the organization that the author works for.