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Future Thinking: Mobile Communication Trends
22 Oct 2011
In less than 12 months, Nokia's share of the Global Smart Phone market went from 44% to 27%. In my previous futurist blog From Good to Great to Obsolete, you can find further analysis on this topic, but today's blog post concerns how we need to think about mobile communication trends, their impact on business, and how every organisation can prepare themselves for dealing with this change in communication patterns.
Check out the following visuals for some amazing statistics on these shifts.
Nokia's Symbian platform is competing with the free Android platform and the hugely popular iPhone OS. Clearly, it's not keeping up. The question is whether the Finns can get back on the front foot or if the train has left the station? Importantly for your organisation, how will this impact the enterprise mobiles you will be using and equipping your staff with?
What about this mobile communication trend? None of the top ten most trusted brands for mobile payments are a bank. Because of shifting consumer behaviours, non-traditional players are able to enter many conservative industries. This will define not only the future of banking, but every industry as consumers' relationships with brands will largely be defined by telecommunications providers and handset manufacturers.
Asia in many ways is like a future lab, as my futurist colleague Mike Walsh says, so what happens when we look at the uptake of mobile technologies not only in the developed Asian economies, but more broadly across the emerging Asian landscape? You will notice that there is still significant growth potential in the smart phone markets in Thailand, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, and India according to Credit Suisse. This provides exciting opportunities for manufacturers both of smart phones, but also data providers, and content producers.
So, what can we glean about the future of mobile communication trends from these disparate projections and statistical futures?
Here are some quick take-aways to consider:
Think carefully about which mobile devices you equip your talent with, if you equip them at all. If you do choose to equip them with the latest mobile devices, you need to ensure you back the future winners, otherwise you'll soon have a fleet of defunct devices floating around.
Non-traditional players are likely to invade any product or service industry whose commercial activities include anything that can be digitised eg. banking, music, telecommunications, movies, and print et al.
Asia is likely to continue to lead these mobile communication trends, as more of its middle class steps up into smart phone ownership, with huge potential for telecommunications providers, handset manufacturers, and companies keen to reach a new psychographic of Asian consumers.
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