Author: Lucy

Vmob teams up with New Zealand’s largest loyalty program.

The partnership formed between mobile marketing company Vmob and loyalty program Fly Buys, will result in a mobile platform that will be geared toward targeting the personal preferences of smartphone users who will be sent promotions, offers and sales opportunities based on what most appeals to them.

New mobile platform will aim to give customers more of what they want.

“One of the criticisms I often get from customers is, ‘You know a lot about me, why do you keep sending me things that aren’t relevant?” said Fly Buys owner and chief of Loyalty New Zealand, Stephen England-Hall. He said that the new platform will give Fly Buys the ability to better target the needs and desires of customers instead of offering them products that are intended for a wider and general group of consumers.

In a few months, the mobile marketing platform will be ready to go. The information it uses will be based on the customers past shopping habits and their location, which will allow it to send them promotions and offers that are relevant.

England-Hall stated that with the partnership and mobile combined, the company will finally be able to eliminate what is irrelevant and can be more specific with targeting. He also mentioned that even though the new platform will use the personal data of consumers in terms of their previous shopping trends and location, this will only make Fly Buys work with greater diligence to ensure private customer information is protected.

Many consumers worry that mobile marketing is becoming too intrusive.

According to England-Hall, people have concerns regarding mobile marketing and its invasiveness. Due to this reason, if they feel that a company is becoming too intrusive they will “delete you”. Therefore it is very important for marketing to be done with greater care and respect than it has been in the past.

Vmob, a cloud-based company from New Zealand, has achieved international success via partnerships with big name clients including Telkom Indonesia, and McDonald’s Netherlands. However, despite this success, the chief executive and founder of Vmob, Scott Bradley, says that it is wonderful to have formed a strong partnership with New Zealand’s largest loyalty program. 1.4 million active households are part of the Fly Buys loyalty program, which is approximately 74% of all the households in the country.

Mobile marketing is key to a successful shopping experience for both the seller and buyer. Bradley said, “We need to turn shopping back to a service-oriented culture rather than a transactional one, and service comes from knowing your customer.”

The struggling Canadian handset manufacturer is now looking to new device management application options.

As a growing number of smartphone users turn their sights toward third party mobile apps in order to manage their gadgets, BlackBerry has now announced that it will be opening up its current operating system – BlackBerry 10 – to its rivals as a part of an overall strategy that would give products from other companies the ability to manage their gadgets.

The company claims that there have been a number of parties that have expressed interest in this area.

According to BlackBerry, it has seen interest from Citrix, SAP, AirWatch, and even IBM, in being capable of providing mobile apps that would manage the smartphones from that company. BlackBerry released a statement that quoted the Gartner research firm in saying that “Mobile device management (MDM) remains a top priority for IT buyers, and investment levels are growing steadily. Competition among players drives commoditization.”

This BlackBerry acknowledgement regarding third party mobile apps underscores an important trend.

BlackBerry’s statement went on to further quote Gartner by saying that “Proliferation of and demand for workplace mobility necessitate the need for quality and flexible management tools.” Because of this, said BlackBerry, the company is now seeking to be able to work with the aforementioned companies that have expressed interest in giving their customers the “most flexible solution” in order to be able to “support a broader enterprise mobility strategy.”

This places an even greater spotlight on the rising trend among consumers to look to third party opportunities to provide them with their mobile device management options. This is especially true as companies open up their bring your own device (BYOD) policies to a growing number of different types of gadgets.

By introducing this new mobile apps policy, it is BlackBerry’s method of making certain that its own handsets will continue their relevance and will hold onto the foothold they have made within the enterprise space. There, many of the large scale networks are already managed by MDM applications provided by third party vendors. At the same time, the company has clearly stated that it will be continuing to offer its own multi-platform enterprise mobility management platform, the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES10).