Is Your (Lack of) Mobile Strategy Fracturing Your Brand?

The key to a successful mobile app strategy is to build the fewest (yes, the fewest!) number of a highly branded, platform specific, well designed app(s) with the most high value features that solve your customers real problems. 

It takes a great deal of time, money and effort to get a user to go to the App Store and search for your app. When they get there, they should see as few of your brand’s apps as possible while still seeing the breadth of goods and services your brand offers.

Each and every one of your apps should be creatively consistent, on brand, offer real value to your customers and have a logical and dense clustering of features.

By their very nature, departments in large brands tend to be mostly autonomous; large corporations being made up of discrete groups that don’t necessarily communicate well (or at all) with one another. To combat this, your brand needs a strong mobile app strategy and someone empowered to enforce it.

Without a well-planned and well-enforced global management strategy, each of those discrete departments is left to create an app of its own, specific to that department’s needs.

These apps are typically misaligned with global brand goals, lack clear value propositions and even drift wildly from the brand’s creative look and feel and mobile platform standards. The end result of no plan or poor plan enforcement is a glut of apps cluttering the App Store.

For many global brands I see non-US market apps in the US App Store, one-off apps for events that have long since passed and internal release apps on the consumer App Store.

Rather than seeing a few densely packed, full-featured apps that serve the customer throughout the sales and service/ownership cycle I see a host of thin apps with few features, serving only one or two of a customer’s many needs.

Being in the App Store is different from traditional impression-based advertising. It is not about impressions and it is NOT about the total number of apps you have in the App Store. There is no reward for having the most.

In fact, there are quite a few downsides for having a lot of apps that your customers have to sift through and download. Because it takes a lot to get a customer to even go to the App Store and search for your app, you can’t afford to lose that critical download simply because a customer didn’t recognize the app they wanted.