A recent study found that it’s harder to resist a text message than a nicotine fix. Regardless of income level, more than 50% of 18-24 year olds sign up for expensive monthly mobile data plans. And 1 in 3 consumers would give up sex rather than give up their cell phones.
Mobile phones have moved beyond a necessity into an addiction that we can’t live without. However despite the addiction-like obsession that consumers have with their mobile devices most brands are massively underutilizing the addictive power of this rapidly emerging medium. Marketers are lost in a sea of what they could do, figuring out what they should do.
In truth, the power of mobile lies in its addictive pleasures. The marketers who will prosper in this new world will be the ones that can best harness their brands to the addictive powers of the mobile platform.
For us, there are seven elements that make mobile phones impossible to resist. Our addiction to mobile is based on our brain’s instinctual attraction to the power of now, surprises, social rewards, simplicity, free, fun and missions. These are the key elements that marketers need to be aware of when considering how to make their brands as addictive as mobile.
We are addicted to now:
Our brains give primacy to new information over old information, hence our nervousness when we hear our phones buzz when we’re speeding down the highway. Whatever has just arrived, our brains are hard wired to crave, regardless of what we already now, or the risk in glancing at that screen.
Why are we addicted to now? Psychologists have long known that the brain has a weakness when it comes to the here and now. Most people making plans for next week’s desert will prudently choose fruit over chocolate. But when it comes to what we’d like for desert right now, our will power collapses and most choose chocolate over fruit. While our ability to resist desire in the future is stoic in its resolve, our ability to resist desire in the present shares a frightening similarity to the resolve of a pigeons.
When it comes to long range planning, human beings are reasonably rational. Sitting at our laptops we can plan ahead and make good decisions, weighing the appeal of offers we receive against other priorities. But, in the here and now, our skepticism collapses.
Take the app “ScoutMob” it aggregates daily deals so that users get offers only when they check in at local merchants. What’s the difference between reading about an offer on your laptop Vs your smartphone in the retailer that’s making the offer? About a 450% uplift in offer redemption. Brands that make their offers mobile can leverage our addiction to now and see massive lifts on lower value offers than what are typically offered online or offline.
We are addicted to surprises
Part of the huge appeal of mobile phones are their unpredictability. When we hear them buzz, we have no idea what might be in store for us, and that in turn is massively irresistible and motivating.
A famous experiment found that surprising rewards were three times as motivating as predictable rewards. Children were given crayons and asked to draw. Half were promised candy if the drew, and half were promised nothing. Regardless of what they were promised, all received candy at the end of the day, half as a predictable reward, half as a surprising reward. What happened next stunned researchers. They monitored the children the next day to see what happened. The children that received the surprising reward spent three times as much time drawing with crayons as those who received the predictable reward.
Surprises are built into the most successful mobile apps. Urbanspoon’s random recommendations are its raison d’etre. America Express’s Foursquare application is an institutionalization of the surprising reward, tying a standard check-in behavior to an unpredictable reward. The brands that tie surprising rewards in mobile are tapping into one of the most powerful motivators of human behavior
We are addicted to social rewards
The brains response to a human smile is equivalent to the brains response to 2000 bars of chocolate. The question for brands considering mobile is why offer chocolate when you can offer social rewards, ways for consumers to connect with each other will always trump simple material rewards.
Clearly the power of mobile phones lies in its ability to connect with others socially. In truth, with social networking its hard to be witty, charming or provocative all the time. Brands that give consumers easy content to share with others are providing a benefit that taps into our most primordial needs.
Already, 52% of daily facebook users are connecting via mobile but be it Farmville, Nike Fuel, or the New York Times, the common thread is that sharable content that enables users to connect with others is a reward beyond compare.
We are addicted to simple
If the desire for new, surprising, social information hasn’t already made your brand addictive, consider the power of simple. The simpler something is to do, the more likely we are to do it, regardless of the rational costs or benefits.
Consider life vs death. British health officials were shocked to discover that swithing sleeping pills from a bottle to a blister pack led to a 20% decline in suicide rates. The “hassle” of individually extracting pills from blister pack led many to choose life over death.
This grim example shows the profound power of simplicity as an incentive to act, regardless of weather it’s the right thing to do. The entire ecosystem of apps is built on simplicity, taking the jack of all trades browser into a simple, specialized device for one job. The results? Weather.com found that users who used their PC interface used their service 3.9 times a month, but users who used their simplified mobile phone app used the service nearly 10.9 times a month. Simplifying your brand process on mobile could be the most compelling argument why consumers should choose your brand on mobile.
We are addicted to free
Most offers come with a cost and a benefit, so we’re naturally wary, but free offers have no costs, and as a consequence are irresistible. True, free offers involve us using up our time, but for some reason that psychologists have long recognized, we are far more giving with the seemingly unlimited resource of time, than with money, where our bank reminds us monthly of how much money we have left.
With mobile, the results of this willingness to spend time but not money has been profound. The most popular apps are nearly all free. However, once we spend time with an app, we are more willing to value it and see it as worthy of our hard earned money. As a consequence, the free-mium business model on the itunes app store has now generated an estimated $2bln in sales. For brands the lessons for success are clear: If your app is free, we are eager to spend time on it. If we spend time on something, we are eager to spend money on it.
We are addicted for fun
If free is irresistible, fun is our heroin. Not alone does fun not ask for anything in return, but it offers us an immediate reward. How else do you explain Angry Birds, a pointless, simple, stupid game that has 30 million daily users who spend 16 YEARS! an hour playing the game.
Fun is free on steroids, so make your brand as addictive as Angry Birds by making it fun. Examples abound, Geico’s Bro-stache is a shocking waste of time that’s been downloaded 300k times. Sometimes fun is only you need to make your brand compelling.
We are addicted to missions
While we’re addicted to now, social rewards, surprising, simple, free and fun applications, humans are not completely hopeless. On top of these vices, we also hate leaving a task undone. A famous experiment found that giving customers of a coffee shop a coffee loyalty card that offered them 1 free cup of coffee for 10 cups of coffee (with the first two started) had a 78% higher redemption than the exact same offer when presented as 1 free cup of coffee for 8 cups of coffee. Human beings hate leaving something unfinished that they have already started.
Taking isolated incidents and turning them into missions is at the heart of the most popular mobile applications. Take Foursqure, where simple check-ins become the first step in an epic quest to become mayor, resulting in 20mln users a week. Nike Fuel is based on the same insight, taking everyday activity and turning it into a quest for your daily fitness goal. Brands that can transform their isolated encounters with consumers into part of a larger long-term goal, are tapping into humans hard-wired desire to finish what they start, even if they didn’t know they were starting anything.
So what have we learned. Yes mobile is addictive, but its addictive for a reason. It taps into our desire for now, surprises, simple, social rewards, free, fun and missions, desires that our brain finds irresistible. The brands that use these principles in mobile are well poised to make their brands as addictive as the mobile platform from which it was born.
