We evaluated 28 companies from the food, FMCG, clothing and media retailing business. One Third has not yet fully utilized the potentials of the mobile Internet it offers as a valuable channel to push sales, while another Third has not gone mobile at all. However, in contrast to our findings regarding the mobile prowess of car manufacturers, we also found some real revelations.

One of the forerunners in going mobile is mail order giant Otto, noticeably surpassing everyone’s darling Amazon, a pure online retailer, in our ranking. Ranked on positions 3 to 10 are the blue-chip companies like Real (foodstuffs), Mediamarkt (electronics) and Edeka (foodstuffs). Douglas (perfume) and Fielmann (glasses) are performing mediocre, while companies like Tchibo (coffee and various non-food articles), Weltbild (books and digital media) or Deichmann (shoes) have a lot to catch up. Looking at the whole picture, stationary retailers are performing worse than the mail order business. In most cases they are not yet aware of the advantages that smartphones offer to get customers to their points-of-sale (POS). Some interesting secondary findings are that Aldi-Nord (foodstuffs) performs far better than its twin Aldi-Süd and that the locally well-known brand for purchasing books, CDs and DVDs – Weltbild – is no match at all for Amazon. This indicates that the existence of a mobile sales strategy has not so much to do with the compatibility of a certain industry, as it has with the attention the managers of a company pay to it.

Source: aquarius research study “Retailers and the mobile Internet”, survey period: April 2011

For the design of our research strategy, we did not take into account whether a company provided exciting games as an iPhone app or not, but instead we investigated if the Internet marketing funnel “Reach-Involvement-Contact-Sales” has been effectively implemented for the mobile channel. Read on for the key findings of our research study:

Reach

Even though the big brands can easily be found via the mobile version of Google and 19 out of the 28 investigated companies paid for GoogleAds, they do not link to their mobile website, but to their standard Internet website. Among them are two companies, that even own a mobile website: Obi (DIY hardware) and Douglas. Only Otto, Amazon and Conrad (electronics) perform well in this category.

Involvement

In general, the websites do not collect many user data or provide the necessary mechanics to induce users to give away personal data voluntarily. The sales model “mobile coupon” is not used at all. Even the most basic functions, like automatic location services are not fully utilized. Only a few mobile websites, those by Douglas, Fielmann and H&M, provide a shop search function based on geo-tracking.

Contact

Because in Phase 2 (Involvement) the amount of data collected from users is very limited and direct interaction with users is nearly non-existent, it is not very surprising that sales is not supported by any meaningful customer contact. A well laid-out dialogue concept targeted at different customer groups is missing.

Sales

Only 5 of the 28 evaluated companies (Otto, Amazon, Lidl (foodstuffs), Douglas and Conrad) entertain sales functions for smartphone users via a mobile website and/or app. Those are actually the ones following the road of mCommerce. Only 13 retailers mention or link to their POS, e.g. provide a shop search function, via their mobile website and/or app. Only 3 brands use geo-tracking to make the lives of users easier to find a shop close to them, the other retailers require users to enter the ZIP code or the name of the location manually. Looking at the 13 companies that offer a mobile app, 12 of them make use of geo-tracking.

Conclusion

If we look at the enormous growth rates of the mobile Internet, it is about time for retailers to provide the necessary interface for their customers to buy products via their mobile phone. Clearly, the design of the sales tool has to take into account the application situation and interests of their customers, in order to provide the relevant products.

Those retailers, that are able to surpass the top-players Otto and Amazon in terms of customer service and mCommerce capabilities will find themselves with never-thought-of opportunities to enhance customer acquisition and loyalty. After all, the mobile phone is the key to reach customers 24hours a day, 7 days in a week.

The technique seems to be very helpful to make your way back home after intense Oktoberfest visits, but that is not the only reason why the Italians developped this cool app. Augmented Works, as Davide and friends call their cooperativa, brought out the GeoTravel App earlier this year – a travel guide with augmented reality based on wikipedia geolocation informations. Especially in Italy, the application had a great success since it has been released. It’s in the first positions in the travel category in the Italian app store for months now. It’s not much known in other countries yet. Hence, they beefed the app up with the CarFinder and published CarFinder for free as a viral marketing tool for the paid app.

This makes a good showcase for the fact that even super-cool apps do not distribute by chance. As in marketing generally, mobile marketing needs a planning process as described in our aquarius mobile marketing funnel.

Car Finder App

Video zur Geo Travel App

Zaak Fox, independent automotive professional from Trinidad and Tobago (!), was the first person to start a BMW-Fanpage on Facebook. After having reached more than 1.000.000 members, the BMW headquarters in Munich – who had turned the Zaak page into their official fanpage – congratulated Zaak on Monday by posting 3 simple pictures: „Thank“, „you,“ and „Zaak“ and calling him „1st of a million“. Since then – the number of fans is growing steadily.

1. The newspaper business model is passé.
   In the good old days, costs were split three ways: editorial, printing and distribution – and were recouped from three sources of income: cover price, display ads, classified ads. That world is a thing of the past. Although costs over the last 15 years have been kept within inflation, the fact remains that subscriptions and individual sales are declining, display ads are down due to market conditions and classified ads have been virtually annihilated by the Internet. None of these three illnesses will be cured by the iPad. Circulation will continue to fall because readers have less time for newspapers. Manufacturers and dealers are doing more and more business directly over the Internet instead of taking the roundabout route of advertising. And small ads will not be making a re-appearance on the iPad. (Hold on a minute: Has no German newspaper publisher ever made a serious attempt to imitate Craigslist?)
2. Newspaper newsrooms don’t know how to publish online.
   This has also been prevented for the last 15 years because of internal practices. 99.9 percent of German newspapers have separate newsrooms for print and online. Only where the American “newsroom concept” has been imitated at the Axel Spinger Blauer Group can media content be carefully controlled. Publishers continue to have difficulties not only with Internet content and business models but also with the technology Big difficulties in fact..
3. Online newsrooms don’t know how to do movies.
   Nobody in Axel Springer’s newsroom can do any of the following either: shoot, edit, add text to and illustrate an AV report, and prepare a table for good measure. This is how the perfect, beautiful new iPad news world would look, if we are to believe the first images we have been shown. But seriously – who is supposed to create this first truly multimedia content? And what will it all cost? OK, magazine editors at Wired and Vogue could do it with the aid of their editorial designer, perhaps even USA Today and the Wall Street Journal – but for the AZ to produce such a thing every day and as locally as possible – would it not merely consist of agency samplers or the amateur work of unpaid journalism students?
4. Users will also not want to pay on the iPad.
   Not for content they can continue to get on the Internet for free. And won’t the Internet also be on the Giant iPod Touch? Or will the iPad completely reverse Internet habits? Well, at least the content of the Süddeutsche Zeitung takes us back half a decade …
   
   Quick screenshot: sueddeutsche.de on the iPad
5. The reach of the iPad will be marginal.
   And so will its relevance for the advertising market. Advertisers buy GRP. They continue to do this according to the traditional patterns they have learned over 50 years of TV. This is where the greatest reach can still be found. Media agencies don’t really have the appetite for planning Internet campaigns, even though 67.2 percent of Germans can now be found online. And now they are expected to produce small multimedia works of art for a few hundred thousand iPad owners (who may just happen to be using, for a fee (!), the content offering on which they have published their advertising work of art)? And if they just do it for fun, then only with Augmented Reality. Unfortunately, the iPad doesn’t have the requisite camera.
6. 6. Apple’s business models always have a clear winner.
   And that is: Apple. Why is Apple “saving” the music industry? Because Steve Jobs enjoys singing in the bath? Maybe. But most of all to get 34 cents from a 99-cent piece of music. Why has Apple made it possible for so many small software companies to develop and distribute iPhone apps? Because Steve Jobs has a soft spot for developers? Sure, but also: to get his hands on 30% of their revenues. Why does Apple want to sell content and subscriptions from non-performing publishers on the iPad? … Right! (Hey: 30% … wasn’t that more or less what the publishers had to paid out for printing and paper back in the good old days?).
7. If I can’t do it, it can be done by force if necessary.
   A good sign of a dying industry is when it begins to call for its risks to be shared by the general public. As with carbon taxes. As with TV license fees, without which radio would be completely dead and TV as good as. The same thing is now being demanded by some publishers (see heise.de). In a nutshell, this is how Christoph Keese explains it on the Heise site: The compulsory levy should apply to the “20 million PCs used commercially in Germany.” Because: “For mobile platforms like the iPhone, publishers also rely on paid content”. German publishers are striking back with a double strategy: cash from the servile and wired PCs in the office by law, and from the oh-so free-thinking Macs via subscription. It will be interesting to see how high the sympathy factor is for the strategy in the freewheeling Apple Society.

CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, vTiger, Update and Microsoft Dynamics CRM (to name a few) are doing just that. More than customer databases, they are “collaboration tools”. Owing to the fact that they will be used throughout the company – if the systems are to be used to their full potential – they have expanded their functionality. The purpose of a CRM System is no longer just the name-giving function of maintaining customer contacts and portraying these contacts digitally. A CRM system creates new and sometimes previously unimaginable relationships between individual colleagues and the collaborator – the employee in the literal sense, not just in a hierarchical sense.

We note such ‘light-bulb moments’ with satisfaction when in CRM project workshops we casually inform the managers of two different business units that they both called Mr. Müller from Meier AG last week and tried to sell him the same product under different conditions. Then even the worst business-card collectors understand the deeper sense of a CRM system.

The next step has already been initiated. We have to get used to the fact that we can depict our entire business life in a CRM system. For example, a few months ago market leader Salesforce.com launched the application Salesforce Chatter. Sugar CRM offers the corresponding Add-ins and the other systems are likely to come up with similar offers soon. The objective is to bring the technologies of the so-called Web 2.0, in particular the social media websites Facebook and Twitter, into the CRM and therefore into the company.

One company video worth watching (despite the annoying American presenter) can be viewed on YouTube. The “Private Corporate Directory” is a particularly good idea – basically a company telephone book. It looks like a Xing – via the “Follow” function it enables you to establish an internal fan base and showcase your skills or knowledge (or lack of it!). This transparency will profoundly change the interpersonal relations within a company. And we don’t mean “Why does Susi from accounting have so many followers since the company Christmas party?” We mean the cooperation and knowledge-sharing that will enable companies who count on such systems to grow quicker than those who hide away knowledge and employees’ contacts on hard disks and servers, or even file folders.

aquarius sales improves the potential of digital sales processes for their customers. This includes the use of CRM systems. Ask Marc Ritter.

Apparently, there are no energy supply problems. Professor Maubach explained that if all vehicles on the road in Germany today were no longer run on petrol or diesel, but on electricity, the amount needed would be equivalent to 15% of the electricity generated today. No problem for electricity producers, who are soon going to be offering this as so-called green electricity. The target quota will be about 25% of the total production within a few years.

But on the fringes of the event, over a bowl of a delicious goulash soup, Professor Maubach revealed the real problem with the electric cars. From the perspective of German car manufacturers, that is. They will only start offering the e-car in larger quantities when they can be certain they have established the same standard of reliability and safety that is already in place with petrol and diesel vehicles. “A CEO from the automotive sector said to me: ‘Imagine what would happen if our electric cars break down by the dozens, or if batteries would go up in smoke. Then I would destroy billions of dollars of our brand value’,” Professor Maubach said.

Manufacturers such as Tesla (we reported here how its e-car sales are going), Indian brand Tata and China’s Build Your Dreams (BYD) don’t have these problems. This is because they haven’t established brand values yet so it cannot be damaged. Furthermore, there are completely different safety requirements in Asia than in Europe,” said Professor Maubach.

A glance at its website reveals BYD is ready to launch seven hybrids and pure e-models. Judging by their looks, you would think they would work here, too. But if we follow Professor Maubach’s reasoning, the Chinese aren’t thinking of selling these cars in Europe before conducting thorough market tests in Asia – if a battery pack flares off there, then there won’t be any PR fiascos. Once the technology has been fully developed, the Indians and Asians can integrate it into the brand cladding that is being handed over to them by American and European car manufacturers more or less at a service charge (see Landrover, Jaguar or Volvo). Also stirring the imagination are reports that auto-parts supplier Magna in Graz is building a centre for e-technology. It makes one wonder what the Steirer had planned for Opel?

So the problem with the quick penetration of electric cars into the German market is a brand problem not a technical one. Reports that BMW is thinking of introducing a new brand make absolute sense in terms of electricity.

Last weekend we took a comprehensive look at the current Facebook memberships and compared the Facebook presence of the clubs in the 1^st Bundesliga [national league] to those of the largest Spanish, English, Italian and French clubs. The result: On the digital playing field, the Spaniards, English and Italians are way ahead. The German clubs lose in national and international reach and therefore in marketing and strength of customer loyalty. Yet there is nothing easier than transforming the emotions of soccer fans from Internet friendship to revenue.

Clubs such as Barcelona, Liverpool and AC Milan use their Facebook pages aggressively for merchandising, ticketing and to procure real – paid – club memberships. No other medium has this ability to communicate directly with millions of fans worldwide. There is huge potential for sponsors, in particular. There are, of course, excellent examples in the offline world of how soccer fans are turned into buyers. From 2003 to 2005, the HypoVereinsbank sold more than 100,000 Bayern Sparcards to FC Bayern fans, amassing €1.7 billion in investment in only two years. Sales effects are becoming the main motivation for investment for more and more sponsors. Companies no longer pay millions so that their logo can flit over the board on Saturday. Coverage and emotions in sports must be transformed into sales. This works quite well on social media platforms. Today, German clubs and their business partners spend a lot of money on the virtual terraces.

Only three clubs in the first Bundesliga even have an official Facebook page (as of February 6, 2010): The HSV (11,000 Facebook fans), Hannover 96 (4,000) and Hertha BSC (2,000). Their sizes are marginal compared with the big European clubs such as Barcelona, Liverpool, Real Madrid (each have more than one million), but also when compared with Chelsea, AC Milan and Paris Saint Germain (each with a few hundred thousand).

At least these three clubs have official websites, giving them online experience. But the largest German clubs by number of members, Bayern Munich and Schalke 04, don’t have anything of their own. Although when one considers the number of actual club members of the FC Bayern Munich – more than 153,000 – then an official Facebook page should, theoretically, become as big as that of Barcelona. The Catalans, with 163,000 members, only have 10,000 more paying club members than Munich’s finest. Our simple model calculation: If you sell every thousandth of the 1.3 million Facebook fans of Bayern an Audi A4, which is quite possible, then that’s 1,300 cars at an average of €35,000 each, resulting in sales of €45.5 million for the Bayern sponsor Audi.

The brand name companies in the USA are even further ahead. For the first time in 23 years, PepsiCo did not have a TV spot last weekend during the broadcast of the finals for the National Football League. Instead, it chose to invest US$20 million in expanding its Facebook page.

Here is a comprehensive comparison of Facebook coverage for German and European football clubs – one click on the graphic and you will see the entire PDF table:

aquarius sales is the new business area of aquarius consulting. Aquarius sales has specialised in increasing the digital potential in marketing and sales processes for our customers.

Those who would like to try it themselves can contact the friendly people around Craig Davis at the TESLA shop in Munich and arrange a test drive. But we also recommend visiting this shop to all those who would like to know how cars are sold in the third millennium. It is astonishingly simple. Take three things: An awesome product. A good story. A website. With this simple recipe, TESLA has sold more than 2,000 cars. No, we’re not talking about the snazzy roadster, which costs around €100,000, owing to its expensive carbon construction, thus limiting it to a few hundred cars worldwide. It is the Model S sedans that are going like hotcakes. So much so, this car won’t be delivered to its proud owners for two years, at the earliest. There isn’t even a factory for it yet.

Future owners pay €4,000 for the basic model or €30,000 for one of the first 1,000 fully equipped “Signature Models”. The final price? Sorry, it’s not yet available in Euros. But in the USA the basic car will (presumably) cost US$57,500 of which US$7,500 will be subsidised by the American government (we also won’t comment on the features of the Model S, which does an impression of a Maserati Quattroporte; TESLA chief designer Franz von Holzhausen will be showing the car on YouTube).

It is not surprising that a company whose CEO is the founder of PayPal (and who builds rockets on the side with the company SpaceX on behalf of NASA), believes in the Internet as a communication medium. Nevertheless the amount of marketing materials that accompany the TESLA web presence is astounding: None. It is only because there are still a few promotional sheets, each about half the size of a postcard, left over from the last IAA that there is anything resembling a brochure in the TESLA shop.

Original dialogue: “Can we have one of the preliminary contracts to order the Model S?” – “Sure, here is the Mac, you can register right away. Then transfer 4,000 Euros and you will be issued a serial number. The car will be here in 2012 and until then you are a part of the TESLA community and will be informed of the progress made just as quickly as the employees. If at some point you aren’t interested in the car anymore, you can get your money back up to three months prior to delivery.”