Scoring Points: How Tesco is Winning Customer Loyalty
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orth reading if you need to know more about how mobile phones can be used as part of the marketing communications mix, this is a good book if you are in a hurry. Things I like about this book centre around techniques deployed throughout to make it easy to read. Plenty of short sentences. Conversational style. Stacks of examples illustrated with pictures from mobile campaigns. Haig clearly knows his stuff, and the book is peppered with quotes from figures in the industry. There is no academic stuff here and little theory: this is a practitioners’ ‘why this is important and how to do it’ guide. The academic side of me was a little irritated with the rather incessant promotion of mobile marketing throughout the book. The basic story here is that mobile as a medium is great news for marketers and has unique advantages over other media. Call me old-fashioned, but I am more persuaded by an objective analysis of mobile versus close competitors like e-mail, websites, traditional fixed-line telephone and even direct mail. Mobile marketing can offer excitement through its immediacy. It can feed off group effects extremely well — adding value to football fans texting each other, for example — so it can become
䉷 Henry Stewart Publications 1741-2447 (2003)
Vol. 11, 2, 183–187
more than an advert and be something people can use. Linked to global positioning system (GPS) technology, mobile can uniquely link the message to a person’s location. All this is described in depth in the book, but it would have been nice to see a more sober debate on the likely limitations of the medium, plus an expansion of the wider picture — that there are plenty of things that other media will do better. (Would a financial services firm really want to announce a mortgage offer through mobile texting?) There is a chapter on integrating mobile with other media, but I felt more thorough discussion was needed throughout. One short section describing location-based services illustrates the strengths and weakness of the book. It is easy to read, it starts by highlighting the amazing technology plus also the fact that receiving dozens of messages as you walk through the mall could actually get on your nerves. But the section ends with some direct marketing clichés about one–one marketing, precisely targeting consumer needs, permission based, blah blah, that frankly remain huge overclaims by the industry. There is also the rather too easy
Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management
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Book reviews
acceptance of the ‘technology’s great: it’ll change our lives’ message. Take m-payment, the use of the mobile phone as an electronic wallet. This is described with excitement (‘trialled in Denmark, and it works!’) but the author does not stop to ask: what actually is the benefit of this service compared to boring old money/cards in a wallet? Those of us with long memories will remember the ‘change the world’ rhetoric of Mondex; that seems to have more modest aspirations these days. There is a welcome chapter on responsible marketing, pointing out the d
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