Mobile marketing in Vietnam: potential remains unlocked

Mobile marketing has been widely known for its effect in conveying company image and products to customers, but Vietnamese companies have not been really interested in this form of marketing.

When he attended the ceremony presenting the Vietnam Mobile Award in Hanoi in late March, Professor John A. Quelch from Harvard Business School, a world leading expert in brands and marketing, said: The strength of mobile devices can be used as a marketing tool. A handheld device with global positioning system (GPS) can allow users to send an instant message to another device owner with contents unique to the current position of that person. A restaurant can send an advertisement to all mobile devices within a radius 100 metres. John Quelch emphasised: “The mission of marketers is to promote imagination on how to make full use of mobile applications for their business.”

Promising land

At a prestigious summit of the ICT industry held in the framework the global ICT 2010 Singapore Conference, leading ICT specialists forecast that global mobile marketing will increase nine fold in the next three years. In an announcement in October 2009, AdMod – a leading mobile marketing firm in the US – said: Mobile marketing demand rose more than six times each month, with value growing from US$1.6 billion to US$10.2 billion from September 2007 to September 2009. In September 2009, AdMod received more than 10 million advertisement orders. With such figures, Marty Cooper, the father of mobile phones, could not believe that his “child” could give birth to such an immense industry which has been generating benefits for the whole world.

In Vietnam, mobile marketing is still a new concept and is a wide open field for companies to pursue and develop. Therefore, Mr Cao Van Khanh, Chief Executive Officer of GAPIT Communications Joint Stock Company, said that mobile marketing is a potential vehicle for Vietnamese enterprises to spread information about brands, products and services to customers. Vietnam currently has more than 80 million mobile subscribers – 80 million devices highly capable of transmitting information to users. However, according to Mr Khanh, companies are currently not really aware of this form of marketing, partly because they have not witnessed the effectiveness of marketing in general and mobile marketing in particular. And, Khanh said, the most critical reason is that there are very few providers of mobile marketing consulting services for enterprises. “We want to mention the ability to advise and direct enterprises to approach their target markets. There are a lot of communication channels on mobile devices, but Vietnam currently has only the simplest channel of SMS. Though this form catches the attention, the outcome is very discrete. Thus, when companies have not perceived real benefits, they will not invest. This is completely understandable,” said Khanh.

Not only SMS

Actually, the main form of mobile marketing in Vietnam is SMS marketing. Since its debut on the market, SMS marketing has been favourably welcomed by most content providers as they consider this a new form of business. However, this form of marketing is simply confined to basic services (cooperating with companies to introduce games, voting, etc), not break-through services with outstanding features. Typical examples include BP’s Vistra sending voting messages for the Golden Wrench Award, Orion with Ostar or Kido’s with Celano cream. Mr Vu Hoang Tam, Managing Director of Viet Hung Thai Company, said his company recently cooperated with Naiscorp to deploy mobile marketing business on the Socbay iMedia software user community. There are more than 500,000 users on this network.

But, according to Mr Tam, mobile marketing is not just confined to SMS advertising, but includes many other applications that managers or marketers may not think of, possibly because they are extremely new to them or they lack confidence in this new marketing channel. Therefore, mobile marketers in Vietnam are doing the dual job of developing services and exploring the market at the same time. Several businesses have started to take new steps to diversify their mobile marketing services. For example, Gapit consults its customers to apply general solutions with many mobile-based interactions like SMS, Multimedia and Internet to help them boost sales, brand identity and customer care. Recently, electronic newspaper Vietnamplus has launched a mobile newspaper. An official from this news agency said Vietnamplus Mobile will allow the business community to have quicker, more convenient and reasonable marketing methods than other normal sites. For example, mobile phone users can click on an ad banner on the website and it will navigate to the company’s information. This method will help limit annoying SMS spam.

Need for broad consensus

The development potential and opportunity are great but what digital content companies are now hoping for is the active cooperation from management agencies, mobile network operators and customers. Mr Vu Hoang Tam said, according to Decree 90/2008/ND-CP on anti-spam regulations, Viet Hung Thai Company was granted the management code certificate to launch SMS marketing by the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCERT) under the Ministry of Information and Communications, but Viettel, the largest mobile network, banned digital content service providers from sending SMS advertisements to its mobile phone users, although the company obtained a business certificate from VNCert.

As mobile marketing is associated with mobile networks, digital content service providers thus hope for more open cooperation from them for the sake of legitimate benefits for users interested in advertised products and services. At the same time, they hope to see strict regulation on spamming, which adversely affects the market. Clearly, the future of mobile marketing is heavily dependent on network operators. – VCCI

Tags: Mobile marketing in Vietnam