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White Paper Excerpt

Welcome to the new mobile marketplace
In the past two years we’ve seen revolutionary change in the way we distribute and consume mobile applications. The simultaneous advent of the Apple iPhone and iTunes App Store was like tearing down the Berlin wall surrounding the private garden that mobile operators had enjoyed for more than a decade. Suddenly, developers could publish directly to consumers and eliminate the middlemen, which meant both faster time to market and greater profitability.

The breakthroughs in distribution fueled a boom in application development. With more content readily available from their devices and desktops, consumers had unprecedented access to the channel. In addition to greater availability, periodic advertising campaigns reminded consumers that “there’s an app for that” and further heightened awareness as well as fueling demand. Since 2008, mobile applications—once the purview of gadget geeks and mobile developers—had gone mainstream.

With more than 100,000 applications in the catalog today, and over three billion downloads1, the iTunes App Store has proven its success both as a consumer channel and as an online store. Parallel to this achievement is another triumph worthy of recognition—that of the consumer, who along the way has mastered the art of downloading and installing content to their phone, something that used to be foreign and cumbersome. The net effect of the iPhone and iTunes App Store is that it has opened up a direct pipeline to mass-market devices—“the only mass medium with a built-in payment plan.”2
Still in the afterglow of what I call “app store mania,” more online store and platform news arises almost daily. But when the novelty wears off and the dust settles, the App Store, the delivery channel, and the platform statistics will fade into the background. Soon the focus will come back to the consumer and the content they’re most interested in downloading. This is where brand owners have a unique opportunity. As the saying goes, “Content is king!”

By taking your brand mobile and leveraging the unique properties of the medium, you have an opportunity to extend your brand’s reach, deepen the customer relationship, build brand loyalty, and even create a new revenue stream. What’s more, you can reap these benefits at minimal cost because you can reuse the same skills, tools, and code base you already have in-house. This paper is dedicated to helping you, your designers, and your developers get started publishing to this exciting new channel.

Tagged as

adobe, android, iphone, mobile devices, nokia, pim, ui