A Survey About Mobile Payments
Last week, I tried a little survey about the usability and awareness of mobile money transfers. I used the FriendFeed contacts and my university mail group as the candidates and got 30 answers back. The candidates were between 23-45 years old which is the target age interval for mobile services. Let’s have a look at some of the feedbacks.
Ali Haydar Ünsal, who has a deep experience in banking, is complaining about forgetting the pins/passwords in shopping but still uses frequently for money transfers. Ekim Nazım Kaya, founder and CEO of Botego finds it the easiest and simple way of money transferring. Meriç Kara, a technology editor, and Y. Emre Güzer, an e-commerce expert, uses it in case of forgetting their wallets home and upon sisters’ insistent demands. On the other hand, 60% of my colleagues from university don’t use it and only 5% of them are using properly. Some of them complain about advertising deficiencies.
Having these results make me think about possible improvements in marketing the mobile money transfers and payments as well.
First of all, I believe that, a payment mobilizer must determine the optimum mass for introducing and advertising the product. After the innovation process and launch of the product, the most important part is finding the correct consumers and effecting consuming part of their brains. Not only in mobile payments, but also in other sectors’ products, we see that there are lots of idle facilities and products which are not used and analysed by the owners.
Second, it’s so important how you positioned and named your product. If the consumers (another result of the survey) mix your product with other similar products, you can not have loyal consumers. You must highlight the difference, advantage and excellence (if there is) of your product. Also, it’s beneficial to show the specific uses of your product. For example, in this example, catchwords like “You forgot your wallet home, no problem!” or “Maybe your friend needs money right now in his nature trip” or “You had to hurry to take a taxi ? Still no problem !” , etc…
Third, people must understand the advantage to use your product. Why should they need your new mobile money transfer service against the typical services ? Linked with promotions, online campaigns, location based games, advergames and fixed time limited contests ( e.g. On this Saturday, between 1 – 5 p.m., whose friend draws money the first gets the big award)
In my opinion, these are the main and well known ciritical key points of implementing a mobile transfer / payments service.
