Marketing strategies for mobile applications, and revenue model based on advertising

Abstract

India’s telecom sector is world’s second largest after china in terms of mobile subscriber base. This shows a lot of promise in the sector. An appropriate strategy that can take advantage of these opportunities and develop a sustainable model will reap the benefits in the future. The project was intended to find out the market potential of third party mobile applications and generate hypothetical revenue models. The approach was to do a secondary research on the mobile phone penetration and the use of mobile internet among the users. It led to identify the factors behind the growth of mobile internet and the demographic profile of the users. It gave insights into the different advertising mechanisms one can employ and the kind of applications they would be most interested in. This was followed by a primary research where, interactions with few user groups and a survey paved way to identify several aspects of the user’s orientation towards the mobile applications and advertisements. The sample was largely urban and most of them are in the age group of 20-35 years of age. The analysis of survey gave insights about the preferences the user group had for the applications, their view towards the mobile internet and about their gaming preferences. The revenue model was based on the ads, survey aimed to identify their attitude towards the advertisements mechanisms and kind of ads in particular. Most of them preferred to have ads embedded in their applications and at the same time also expressed the irrelevance in the ads targeted at them. They also indicated they would prefer to have national/ international brands and few even indicated to choose the kind of ads while downloading the application. Based on the survey findings, market potential was estimated to be around $1.9Bn, which accounts only the younger generation. This shows huge opportunity for mobile application developers and telecom operators in mobile content segment. In the subsequent phase, the penetration strategy for the applications was designed and strategies like viral distribution, leased GPRS and advertisement sharing were considered. And as a part of advertising strategies, viral sharing, and ad engine with ad recharge, paid applications and few others were considered. The entire model still bases on the efficiency and the essence of the applications they create for the users and that will have an overall impact on all the stakeholders. The report also talks of the limitations of the findings as well. As a whole the report tries to give an overall understanding of an emerging market which is at a nascent stage and different strategies to go about it.