Let's look at real bricks-and-mortar retail establishments. What is the role of mobile to them?

It's three-fold.

There is "marketing communication" we can deliver to customers before they come to our store — and use mobile to drive foot traffic. This is very important in an era when e-tailers like Amazon and Expedia and Ebay are expanding their product offerings and trying to sell everything online (and increasingly also on mobile). If you own prime retail space in the main shopping district in your town, you want your customers to keep coming to your stores and make purchases there. Mobile is a new way to help drive visitors to your store.

Then there is the experience within the store. As the retailers get to know mobile, they notice it is a powerful  tool for customers already inside their store — to help them try something, go to a different part of the store, and to engage with the customer — all while hoping to sell them more stuff.

The third experience is "after shopping" experience. The mobile phone goes everywhere, where our shopper goes with the newly bought goods. So every loyalty program should start with mobile: a mobile is carried even when the wallet is not.

For example ...

Examples of the first kind are most common, because that is usually where most mobile marketing will know to start. US retail giant Target has a mobile service that allows consumers to find out which of their Target stores has a given item in stock, and how many of those items are in that particular store, etc. This is obvious to retail chains to consider when they start to deploy mobile marketing to their consumers. 

Mobile is used to drive retail visitors to stores from the Puma adver-game in China, to Victoria's Secret when they opened their new store in Chicago, to Borders bookstore, which reported 23% response rates to their personalized book offer coupons delivered via mobile.

Where e-tailers are direct rivals to the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, mobile is a friend to the traditional store-keepers. Mobile helps you bring visitors to your store. It can be far more than that, but don't think of the idea of the movie Minority Report and its style of personalized spam ads delivered by location. That idea of location-based ads delivered to random walkers-by is a myth, it is economically not viable and it is hated by consumers.

All of the above campaigns that I mentioned were on the basis of opt-in. You have to build your mobile marketing target database by opt-in basis. That is a slow process and you have to start now. But it can be incredibly powerful.

In store ...

Mobile should be used to move the customers around the store, to bring them to try new things you sell, and of course to offer them instant coupons and discounts and offers. In Singapore I heard of the Adidas store promotion, which was the world's first use of Augmented Reality "first person" with a digital mirror that allowed instant fittings of t-shirts with the help of a simple cameraphone.

More powerful is the idea from Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket chain. Tesco is now offering an intelligent shopping list service. The logic of using the mobile phone as your shopping list is obvious for most consumers. The phone is always with us, so we can easily see what needs to go on the list. If we integrate that with our Tesco's shopping experience, Tesco can offer to add items from our previous shopping visits directly to the shopping list and using 2D barcodes (QR codes), they make it easy to add new items to the shopping list while in the store. Then, Tesco asks you which Tesco store you want to visit, and then the site will automatically rearrange the shopping list in the order of the items in the shopping aisles of that particular Tesco Store.

This is only the beginning. We can do games in the stores, have customers collect points for visiting a specific department or desk, or viewing a particular promotion or engaging with an automated digital marketing gadget like some touch screen promotional panel for example. Give our customers some loyalty points or chances to win some trinkets and soon they cannot imagine shopping without having the phone in their hands all the time.

After shopping ...

Retailers do not quite understand this part: the mobile phone is on us, even after our wallet is not. We take our phones to the bathroom. We sleep with the phone in bed with us. No other mass medium has ever had such a reach.

It's an obvious channel for customer feedback. In Singapore, if you visit the mobile operator store, you will receive an SMS message after you leave, asking you if you were satisfied with your visit to the store. You can respond by simple SMS saying yes or no. That message obviously is not charged to your phone bill. And if you say you were not satisfied, you will receive a call to find out what happened.

This approach can also be used for things like loyalty points, follow-up communications, updates, accessories, etc.

In the USA, Rite Aid now lets its loyalty card holders register their cellphone number to the loyalty card. Then the customer does not need to carry the Rite Aid printed loyalty card anymore, but only give the phone number at the cash register, to collect the loyalty points. But Rite Aid also send alerts when a given prescription is about to run out. This kind of after-care is what mobile is by far the best tool to use. 

Finnish libraries send reminders to users two days before a book is due back, to remember to bring it back, and allowing the user to re-new the book loan via SMS as long as the book is not ordered by another library patron.

Your window display ...

Your window is designed to try to bring people into your store. It can be a very powerful sales person while you are closed. Why not make an interactive advertising game into your window display, to run automatically overnight, to collect phone numbers and permissions of passers-by to join the game. So, for example, if you are a jeweller, offer a chance to win a men's watch at the end of the month.

And as the customers register to your contest, ask them if they will allow you to promote to them via the phone. This is the process you should be doing at all times, everywhere. Keep asking permission to have your customer signed up to your opt-in database.

Now is the time to better understand mobile. You can go into mobile at three separate stages of your consumer's consumption pattern. You can talk to the consumer before the purchase, advertise to the consumer. You can also talk to the consumer when they are in your store. And you can still engage with the consumer after they have left your store with their purchase. Mobile is the ultimate customer relationship device. Make powerful use if it now, before all of your rivals are doing it, and you will find a competitive advantage in mobile.

Read the full article at the Communities Dominate Brands blog of Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore.