Target has been greatly expanding its mcommerce offerings and is now focusing on specific demographics.
After a highly successful Christmas shopping season, Target is now taking its mobile marketing in more specific directions as it places its focus on the Hispanic community for its 2013 advertising and promotions.
It will be using certain cutting edge advertising techniques to reach these smartphone using consumers.
Even before the holiday shopping season has come to a close, with after Christmas sales still heavily sought, the retail giant has confirmed its intentions to work with LatinWorks in order to expand its U.S. Hispanic account, following an extensive review process that was performed over a three month period.
This mobile marketing effort is a strategic effort to improve appeal to the Hispanic community.
According to the Target senior group manager of public relations, Katie Boylan, “LatinWorks has been selected and will be our primary strategic partner for Hispanic marketing.” The retailer has been working to reach out to the Hispanic community for some time, and has been improving its position in that marketplace. However, it is hoping that by partnering with LatinWorks, it will be able to truly excel.
According to the latest data from the mobile industry, the Hispanic and Black populations are some of the communities in which smartphone penetration is at its greatest. This makes the Hispanic community one of the most important places for any mobile marketing campaign to place its focus.
A report from Portada that was released in June showed that the smartphone penetration in the United States had been approaching 50 percent at that time. It expressed that “it’s no surprise that the adoption of mobile shopping tools has been rapid.”
The Hispanic community has been a part of this adoption trend to a much greater extent than Caucasians in the country. In fact, 16 percent of Hispanic shoppers use their smartphones or tablets for making a purchase, when compared to only 10 percent of Caucasian consumers. Target has seen this as a very important mobile marketing opportunity, and it is one that they do not intend to miss.
Researchers are cautioning device users to be careful with the financial and personal data they share.
As mcommerce explodes in popularity, a rapidly increasing number of people are shopping over their smartphones and tablets, making them a natural target to those who would threaten their mobile security through malware and other malicious cyber attacks.
This, according to the researchers at Javelin Strategy and Research, who wrote a report on the topic.
In its most recently released report from Javelin, the researchers explained that the mobile security threats to the various payment platforms have already reached $20 billion, and they are on the rise. They explained that the smartphone payments sector’s open source platform at Android may experience some of the largest struggles as a soft target, with its 50 million domestic smartphone users.
The researchers pointed out that the mobile security threats will be far from exclusive to Android device users.
Equally, though, the researchers also indicated that mobile security threats are targeting the iPhone and its 33 million domestic users. This could be even more damaging as these are the individuals who have the greatest tendency to shop over their smartphones and who spend the most money on their mobile purchases.
According to the authors of the report “Smartphone security is an increasing concern as mobile malware multiplies exponentially, and Android’s open source platform continues to gain market share over iOS.” They indicated that while Android is the target of the majority of malware so far, as it has the largest number of users, hackers still consider iOS to be the most valuable goal, if more challenging to crack.
The report stated that “iOS users spend more individually and have greater deposits on average than Android users.”
The researchers expect that by 2017, approximately 57 percent of adults will own smartphones based on the Android operating system. This will be almost precisely double the number who are predicted to have iPhones, at 28 percent. This skyrocketing use of Android devices will align predictably with the type of mobile security threats and malware volume that the researchers anticipate over the same time period. This is not unprecedented, as the number of Android targeting malware threats increased in the second half of this year from about 30,000 to approximately 175,000.
