Mobilise Your Brand

Mobilise your brand is what we do at?MVNE,?

(Mobile Virtual Network Enabler) when we help brands combine their core business with Telco to design a unique customer value proposition.??

MVNE is the enabler for?DSTV Internet, which is a huge success because it solves the need to combine content and connectivity in Africa.

For consumers, the cost of data is the biggest part of the spend when streaming entertainment. Therefore, a cost-effective communications solution is critical to make the DSTV content more accessible anywhere, anytime, on any device.

For example, If you are watching 10 movies a month, you will require around 5GB of data which is equivalent to around R500 in South Africa, whereas the subscription fee for the content is only R79 for 3 months or R26,33 per month, so just over 5% of total wallet share required to watch those 10 movies a month is actually for content.

Since the launch of DSTV internet and subsidy of the data costs for the combined value proposition, the uptake for the service has been phenomenal, and we believe that it has the potential to be one of the biggest MVNOs in Africa due to the great value proposition and great packages offered to consumers.

Did you know that 50% of Africans have mobile phones? This means that mobile technology is the largest platform in Africa and can access a wide range of income groups. AppsAfrica reports Mobile App downloads have surpassed 98 billion, a sizeable market growing very fast.

According to Wikipedia, “a consequence of the wider availability of mobile telephony with respect to fixed telephony, in many African countries, most?Internet?traffic goes through the mobile network. An example is?Seychelles, the African country with a larger percentage of Internet subscribers, where most Internet users access the net through the mobile network.”

According to?Hootsuite, South Africans are higher than the global average, spending more than 10 hours a day on the internet, connecting via mobile devices.

The average consumer checks their phone 150 times daily, more than 10 times per hour.

87% of millennials admit their smartphone is always with them. Therefore, a brand needs to ensure that it creates on-demand, personal, engaging experiences with and for consumers when targeting them on their mobile.

Mobile is Personal, frictionless, provides access and sensors and cameras, provides location data and payment, and is a social platform.

Never has there been such a surge in mobile usage and application development to meet the demands and challenges of fast-paced consumers who increasingly rely on mobile devices to connect with brands.

We used mobile to improve customer service by asking Nando’s customers to SMS to rate their service. We measured NPS (Net promoter score) and CSAT (Customer satisfaction) and got to know customers better through the ‘What’s your flava’ campaign that issued the first mobile voucher. ??

According to?Statista, about 20 to 22 million people in South Africa use a smartphone. The price parity between feature phones and smartphones has narrowed so much that we believe soon we will see the same levels of Smartphone penetration and, therefore, internet penetration that you see in Europe and North America due to the growing demand for low-cost smartphones or as we call them the “Hero Device.”

?We are mobile natives as we pioneered mobile commerce in March 2000 when we launched the first mobile commerce transaction in the world on mywap.digitalmall.com.

It was ground-breaking, and we evolved our solution to launch the first mobile ticketing for Ster Kinekor in 2001 as part of an Omni -channel commerce solution. In 2004 - we launched the first and only gambling board-approved mobile betting application for Phumelela for Horse Racing and Soccer, winning the best B2C m-commerce application at Vodacom Mobile Connect 2004.

In the same year, we launched the first financial mobile application for TransUnion Mead & McGrouther at the time, now known as TransUnion Auto, which won the best enterprise solution award.

We created the first e-book on mobile, “The car dealer guide” - which is the bible of the industry, was outdated by the time it was printed, and we made an electronic version of it with value adds such as a “finance calculator.” We updated it over the years to include a new customer journey and multiple new web services. This unique app, called?1 Check, won several additional awards over the years, including MTN App of the year and delivered unbelievable ROI as a premium subscription service. The key success factor is using the camera to shorten the customer journey into one click. Simplicity is the key to adoption.

Today, we continue to see a move towards app-driven businesses such as?MiWay Blink.

MiWay saw an opportunity to bring a fresh, innovative approach to car insurance that uses smart tech in the background to get customers complete cover, cashback, and amazing service, all in a blink! ??

The underlying technology behind the behaviours-based insurance is?Zendrive?mobile SDK (Software Development Kit). Zendrive provides AI and Machine Learning algorithms trained by over 320 billion Kms of data and robust technology reaching 100s of millions of mobile users across the globe.

With mobile, it’s easier for your customers to help themselves, and that is the Holy Grail of running a successful mobile-first brand: lowering the cost to serve and getting better customer insight.

The ability to think creatively and create on-demand, personal, engaging networked experiences with and for consumers has never been so critical to the success of your business as it is today.

Hootsuite also discovered that 92.1% of internet users aged between 16-64 use their mobile device to access the internet. Mobile is by far the most personal channel and m-commerce applications such as Digitalmall.com are making life so much easier for consumers.?

The research also pointed out that “Almost 60% of internet users across the globe bought something online every single week”.

Getting your Brand on the customer’s mobile phone is almost like getting them to Tattoo it on their arm ??. The industry and brands now recognise that a large portion of the marketing budget ( 25-50% ) should be spent on mobile. We forecast that in Africa, most marketing spend will migrate to mobile over the next few years as brands recognise the effectiveness and ROI.

Operators see mobile advertising as a way to make products and services more affordable for low ARPU customers (“Freemium Model “) and a way to retain them longer as they get?“More value for money for the attention span”.

Now that people are working from everywhere, mobile and data have become increasingly important and a critical success factor.

Mobile impacts every step of the customer journey, as shown below.

The Paradigm shift with mobile marketing has been phenomenal. When you add location-based marketing, it is by far the most targeted and effective channel.

You can build campaigns triggered by user actions and delivered in real-time, track every event your customers take, and determine the funnels you want customers to experience and guide them down that path through personalised in-app messaging and recommendations.

Mobile is the most formidable channel for marketing in Africa.

Make the most of it and Mobilise your Brand #DoingSomethingGreat