Maarja Semevsky

Now and then I follow up on the statistics about which country is the leader in using mobile phones and sending text messages. Mainly the leader is the USA, followed by Russia. But at the moment the studies are showing that Russians do not like talking on mobile phones or sending text messages, but what they do like is ordering and downloading different mobile contents from the internet.

It is not very surprising that also in Great Britain there are quite many text message senders – about 113 million personal messages a day.

India is surprisingly on the rise. According to experts, there are 5 million new mobile users every month and by the year 2008 India is expected to win a silver medal in the charts.

To make the situation more tense the Canadians have started to send more and more text messages. When one compares the years 2005 and 2006, striking differences can be seen. Namely in 2006 almost 3 times as many personal text messages were sent as the previous year, that is 4.3 billion messages instead of earlier 1.5 billion.

Probably not all the countries can be assessed by the same criteria as one has to take into consideration their culture and differences in consumer behaviour stemming from it. But it is evident that increasingly more and in increasingly more countries text messaging is used for communication.

Lauri Kinkar

A while ago I-Touch Movilisto published some facts that had caught their attention during the three years of being in business. Despite the fact that the success of a marketing campaign is determined by approximately zillion different factors starting from the product characteristics and target group profile to the timing and context of the campaign, Movilisto dared to come forth with some concrete numbers. Thanks to that we are able to compare their experiences with those of us much more objectively.

Thus, without further delay, I would like to point out three observations from this study, which as a rule apply also to Canada and North America:

*5–20% of the target group usually respond to the call to send a text message and participate in a prize campaign.

To be precise, Movilisto’s analysis talks about people who come in contact with the calls for participation. At the same time one should mind the fact that in the context of sales promotion campaigns, “people who come in contact with the calls” are basically the buyers of the product. Of the latter some have chosen the campaign product because of the prize game and some have not – both groups notice the game targeted at them at some point or another and may participate in it if they wish to. Be it as may, with my experience based on conducting about 120 consumer games with Mobi, I honestly think that the participation percentage suggested by Movilisto can be used as a rule of thumb, with some excellent campaigns outdoing it from time to time.

*48% of people aged 20-40 participate in a suitable marketing campaign preferably via text messages.

The Internet follows with only 26% presumably because a text message can be quickly sent precisely at that moment when mouth-watering campaign prizes and attractive appeals printed on the box are discovered. As that may happen in a checkout line, by the stove or on a tram, the chances that a working Internet connection is at hand, is pretty slim. 19% of people allegedly respond preferably by calling and 7% of the people wish to participate via snail mail.

While viewing the present statistics, one should definitely take into consideration the context in which the response takes place – I believe that people participate in campaigns on product home pages which they can reach during their lunch break at the office by clicking on a banner, at the same time as the majority of consumer games have written their direct communication and participation instructions on labels, which can be studied anywhere.

*As a rule 65% of the campaigns use many response channels (the Internet, snail mail, etc.) and do not rely on mobile phones as the most preferred communication channel. The remaining 35% of the campaigns enabled participation only via text messages. My suggestion to the planners of similar campaigns is that if it is not a typical situation of a very specific participation, then all channels can be used, so as not to limit needlessly the participation in the campaign

I believe that those three facts and suggestions enable all consumer game planners to predict better their participation numbers. As a final commentary may it be said that I-Touch has connections with 95 operators all over the world and thus reaches 400 million end users.