If last year’s Consumer Electronics Show was all about mobile, mobile, mobile, this year’s is…well, still about mobile. But CES 2012 is about mobile spiked with content, and how people will behave and purchase when those dots are connected.
Photo by Flickr user Horia Varlan, licensed under Creative Commons: http://flic.kr/p/7vB7fR
Let’s start with the booming number of application marketplaces. From the Android Market to the App Store to Amazon and Yahoo app markets and more, it’s increasingly important for brands to identify where their resources are best spent. Which app marketplaces are most appropriate for your communities of interest? Does your brand know how to work with application market providers to make sure your brand delivers targeted, compelling content that people will actually use?
And precisely who are those communities of interest? As targeting gets sharper and more accurate, some of those pools of potential and existing customers will be concentrated – smaller in size, but more meaningful in engagement and potential ROI. The shift from the social graph to the ‘interest graph’ will make brands face a tough question: Engage more deeply with a more modest number of people, or go all-out to grow fanbase size, targeting be (somewhat) damned?
So while the pundits say this is a year of incremental change for hardware and electronics, it’s a big year for the widening choices facing brands and marketers. Leveraging the power of the platform has never been more important, but it’s also never been more complex. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t grasped the true meaning of the shift that’s happening.
We’ll be on the ground all week to tell you what’s what, putting the emerging trends and themes into context for brands. Keep up to date here or on our Google+ page for more, and leave a comment if you have any questions you want us to put to the industry figures we’ll be talking to this week.