Forrester on mobile marketing: who you do — and do not — want to target

Forrester released a new report today on mobile marketing. As it turns out, there’s only one group of mobile customers that marketers want to target.

Big shocker: It’s not the 7 percent of American adults who still refuse to use a mobile phone.

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Most American adults now do own cell phones — and it seems sometimes that most kids do too. But for the purposes of mobile marketers, Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish segmented adult American phone owners into five categories:

1. Talkers
   Forget these … they only use their phones as — yikes — phones. Twenty-five percent of American adults, only use their phones to talk.
2. Communicators
   Communicators, who make up another 16 percent of American adults, are a little more adventurous than Talkers. They use newfangled technology like SMS to text each other in addition to talking on their phones.
3. Connectors
   Connectors step it up another notch — but only for work. They talk, text, and use “advanced services” like apps at least once a month, but these Jacks and Jills are dull boys and girls, focused almost entirely on their careers. Can we just say right now that these are BlackBerry owners?
4. Entertainers
   Parrish classifies the second biggest chunk of American adults as “entertainers.” A better description might be “entertained.” This 38 percent of adults in the country use their phones to talk and text, but also to listen to music, watch videos, and play games. Neil Postman would be like, terribly amused.
5. SuperConnecteds
   The biggest chunk of all have both feet firmly planted in the modern world of smartphones and LTE, using apps to network, research, and buy products, check the news and weather, and manage their bank accounts. It’s just even conceivable that they might actually talk on their phones once or twice a day.

(There is some overlap between categories — “for example, SuperConnecteds may also play games at least weekly, and thus also qualify as Entertainers,” Forrester’s Lara Cole explains — which is why the percentages don’t add up to 100.)

According to Parrish, just because 93 percent of Americans own mobile phones, that doesn’t mean they are all valid targets for mobile marketing activities. In fact, quite the opposite. Only the SuperConnecteds — 48 percent of Americans — are the consumers you want to reach.

“These are the users you can engage through innovative and advanced mobile marketing programs,” Parrish says in the report.

Also in the report: how to start mobile marketing, methods of strategic planning, and using an addressability framework (a way of conceptualizing customers based on context, needs, and technology).

photo credit: DavidErickson via photopin cc