Strategy Session: Tamron's Mobile Marketing

Helping Local Dealers Keep Their Deals Local

It wasn’t long ago we realized a simple website could turn a local dealer into a national player. As we all know, the Web has no boundaries; put up a website in Nashua, New Hampshire, and you can sell product in Phoenix, Arizona. But the emergence of the smartphone is now changing that thinking, enabling dealers and manufacturers to once again go local.

For those of us who happen to own a smartphone (dare I say all of us?), it’s becoming more apparent every day that these tools will one day render most other devices useless. As a recent iPhone adopter (after years of BlackBerry loyalty), I often describe my new appendage akin to carrying around a computer in my pocket.

And while you can argue that its primary use is as a phone, the smartphone can also be a marketer’s dream, by being able to grab the attention of individuals in specific geographic regions and marketing to them on practically a one-to-one basis.

“Mobile has become so important to marketers because it is an incredibly powerful tool for engaging and retaining consumers’ attention instantly, as well as inspiring brand loyalty and directly increasing sales,” said Pierre Barbeau, CEO of Moblico, a developer of mobile strategies for business. “It’s no longer a question of whether or not a company should have a mobile strategy but rather what’s the best way to incorporate the mobile channel into a business strategy.”

Tamron is one of the first companies in the imaging industry to begin to take full advantage of this opportunity by developing its own mobile website. While it may be true that every website can be seen on a mobile device, the sites that are developed specifically to conform to the small screen of a mobile device are the true mobile websites of today.

I sat with Stacie Errera, chief marketing officer for Tamron USA, to ask why, and how, Tamron is among the first to dive into this new technology.

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