Necessity is the mother of invention (still).

Last week while speaking at a conference in Dehli I had the chance to see some of the city in a madcap four-hour runaround. This included a bicycle riskshaw ride that took me from the broad streets of new Delhi into the narrow alleyways of the old city. In just 100m everything changed. Apart from being just plain terrifying the journey struck me as perfect metaphor for mobile in India. Maybe just for India full stop.

Everyone who visits India can see it is a country of massive contrasts and a huge divide between have’s and have not’s, between urban and rural life. Similarly there is definitely a two-speed India when it comes to mobile. There is a significant audience of smartphone users and a massive number of feature phone owners, among the 850 million mobile phone owners.

Some of the most interesting mobile marketing campaigns and solutions presented at the event most often came from brands connecting with that feature phone audience, rather than the smartphone one. In particular I was struck by voice-activated campaigns to reach rural consumers with low literacy rates from Marico, India’s equivalent of P&G. These campaigns used celebrity voice messages to get consumers to interact with the brands. Frankly most other options wouldn’t work. 

One of my favourite speakers at this event (and many others) was Gustav Praekelt from South Africa who balances his agency’s digital work with charitable work for his foundation (aimed at sexual health education for young Africans). He told the audience to stop thinking of emerging economies as the ‘third world’ but more as the ‘majority world’. He also presented innovative campaigns using just text and mobile internet without a iPhone or tablet in sight.

In sub-saharan Africa as in India and elsewhere in the majority world mobile is achieving reach through ownership and is the first screen for many people so they are not trying to compare mobile to TV or PC’s. Their first and likely only experience of the internet is through their mobiles. Almost five years ago I heard P&G declare that mobile would be the channel they would use to reach the next billion consumers. I bet they didn’t realize then that they would be doing it through the technology they already had available to them: SMS. What has changed is not the technology but the reach and ubiquity of mobile in our lives. What hasn’t changed is people’s inventiveness to use what they have available to achieve what they want rather than waiting for ‘perfect’. Mobile users in the majority world have lots to teach us on that front.