Japanese Companies Put Mobile Phones At The Center Of Multichannel Experiences

The mobile phone is an essential part of Japanese consumers' lives that goes beyond voice and email capabilities. Japanese companies drive traffic to phones from offline media and PC Web sites, transition customers from the mobile Internet to the PC Web to facilitate complex interactions and enable customers to transfer content on their phones for later use, and use their the mobile Internet to connect with social networks. To get the most out of the mobile channel, firms should conduct ethnographic research with their customers to understand how the mobile channel fits into customers' multichannel lives, design content for activities of varied complexity, and use embedded device capabilities to measure the effectiveness of offline media in the multichannel mix.