Reality Check: SMS offers great way for brands to reach consumers

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Mobile LBS is gaining momentum in commercial markets over the next several years. Juniper Research projects that local search and information services will be used by nearly 1.5 billion mobile subscribers by 2014. Consumers on the go want to know where they can find their favorite brand, where their friends are hanging out and where the heck they should go next.
Leading the way, brands like Starbucks and the Gap recently implemented mobile location-enabled marketing programs with great success. And according to JiWire, 63% of smartphone users reported that they “frequently” use apps that require them to give their location, and location-based mobile ads have the highest response rates.
By law, mobile phones sold since 2005 have to include some form of location targeting technology, creating great commercial market for mobile location-enabled marketing. The growing number of smartphones has helped popularize mobile LBS too. However, brands focusing on handset-based location techniques, like smartphone application development, to reach their consumers are not tapping the full spectrum of the market or the available technology.
Smartpones mostly use GPS signaling technology, which works by constantly monitoring the cellphone signal with or without the consumers’ consent and raising issues of privacy. App development is also laborious due to handset and platform differences among more than 10 major app stores. Unlike SMS text messaging, which is universal, you cannot create an app that works across all phone platforms.
So how do brands wanting to get into the hands of as many consumers as possible leverage SMS as mobile LBS? The answer lies in network-based location techniques, like cell tower triangulation, that utilize the service provider’s network infrastructure to identify the location of the handset. Unlike GPS, with triangulation the consumer controls their location sharing because they must manually query their location. Another great advantage to network-based location techniques is the ability to reach consumers through SMS and thereby significantly broaden the potential brand market. And with SMS there is no need for numerous platform development.
Smartphone apps have a great deal of buzz in the mobile ecosystem but not nearly as much reach as SMS. More importantly, your consumers are already texting up a storm on their phones. All you have to do is reach out and tap in to their conversation.
Marcus Anderson is president of Broadplay Inc., a leading mobile marketing service provider in the
Canadian mobile universe. While the focus of Broadplay Inc. is to allow companies to communicate with their customers’ cell phones, the real expertise lies in generating mobile opt-ins to allow for this engagement on a permission-based fashion. Prior to launching Broadplay, Marcus was VP Sales and Marketing with SiMPRO PCS, a niche market MVNO service provider within the Canadian PCS sector operating on the Microcell network. Marcus has his MBA degree from the Richard Ivey School of Business and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto.