Brands need to banish 'not invented here' syndrome and put user needs above platform politics

Grey-hairs will remember how the earth shook at the birth of the mobile internet, around the turn of the millennium. If you had any vision, you were convinced the text interface of WAP, brought to you at a crazy-fast 10 kilobits per second, would change everything. The INTERNET was on your PHONE and EVERYTHING was going to be DIFFERENT.

Of course, the mobile internet actually followed the traditional Gartner Hype Cycle – the heady excitement of WAP was followed by a Trough of Disillusionment coinciding with the dot com crash. It took around seven years until the iPhone’s release in 2007 for us to start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. It was still just a phone… but even without 3G, the internet really was on your phone. And everything really was different.

Source: Wikipedia: Hype Cycle

Seven years between 'the short run' and 'the long run'; between inflated expectations and enlightenment of the true value of mobile on the move (Tinder, selfies and Angry Birds).

It’s a bit more than seven months since Apple Pay was launched in the US. Device-based NFC payment technology never had a real Peak of Inflated Expectations; certainly not in the consumersphere – yet any UK bank without support for Apple Pay on 14 July was treated by its customers as if it only let them write cheques and hadn’t introduced bank guarantee cards. The Hype Cycle seemed to have missed everything between the Technology Trigger and the Plateau of Productivity, even though (by definition) angry bank customers had not tried the service. The vocal nature of the complaint on Twitter remains astonishing; those banks without support are in full customer-cuddling mode.

A couple of things are happening here – the first is that the internet itself is still revealing the full effect it is having on our lives. We’re still at the beginning of the 'long run'. When it comes to communication, brands find themselves merely as nodes on networks that don’t value their ability to spend on media as much as they value agility and delivery; where their price-earnings ratio is less important than their promises-delivery ratio. We see your adverts, says the customer. Now shut up and tell me why can’t I do what my friend can on her phone – actually, sod it, I’m moving banks because autumn is too long to wait, and you’re simply not keeping up with the possibilities provided by the internet.

Secondly, brands are having to deal with the same shift driving the 'Bring your own device to work' trend where the office BlackBerry is a thing of the past and IT departments have to support increasingly junior staff who insist on using their MacBook instead of their five-year-old PC. Brands own less and less of the spaces in which they communicate or transact: a bank’s customers want to use the features they’ve purchased from technology companies to transact more than they want to use their bank’s own technologies. They want to talk to the bank in their space (like Twitter), not spaces owned by a brand (like paid media).

This is, incidentally, partly the reason why content with genuine value has found its place in the marketing communications toolkit; if you want to communicate your brand’s promise you need to deliver it, not describe it… content does the former and advertising the latter. And you need to provide a reason for a customer to want that communication in the first place.

Apple and its brethren is excellent at inflating expectations for its new technologies. This fact should never, ever be used as an excuse to forget that it is also excellent at meeting genuine user needs, and it can sometimes meet them faster than Gartner’s Hype Cycle ever predicted.

As a result the IPA’s Brand Tech Group tends to be surprisingly homogenous on what brands should consider in times like these: think like an open-minded service designer, putting what your users need above platform politics and 'not invented here' syndrome… other than Google Pay, can you name a mobile payment platform created by a consortium of retailers? They do exist.

It’s undeniably true being in hock to someone else’s tech stack risks your business being increasingly disintermediated – but tech companies will innovate and iterate extremely fast; almost certainly faster than anyone else. The bigger risk is not meeting your customer’s needs. Instead, concentrating on the needs your brand can uniquely satisfy and expressing your brands promise through them, means your brand competes on its own turf.

That’s a fight you can win.

Paul Bennun is chief creative officer at Somethin’ Else and a member of the IPA’s Brand Technology Group.

The IPA Brand Technology Group is exploring the impact technology has on the consumer experience. It aims to bring together the best agencies and brands to provide a single point of view and leadership on key challenges for the communications industry and the wider technology community.