So as we at Mobestar bring another major brand kicking and screaming into the world of mobile the eternal question is asked “Why is it so hard?”

It really should not be the case when you have nearly 3,500,000,000 mobile phones in worldwide circulation and mobile has long been acknowledged as the marketeers ‘silver bullet’ for global domination.  So with apologies to Tom Waites : it  really is Big in Japan so why not here in Europe?  Japan has much higher mobile Internet penetration than the US or Europe. This high usage of the mobile Internet (and mobile data generally) means mobile advertising/marketing is considerably more advanced than elsewhere.

There are good reasons why Japan is king of mobile – it’s not just a cultural thing – and the mobile ecosystem in other countries would benefit greatly if these were emulated. The Japanese operators take much of the credit for fostering this environment (European operators are you listening). NTT DoCoMo, KDDI have the lowest churn rates (i.e. the highest customer loyalty) in the world; SoftBank is fifth. All three are in the top 10 for revenues.  There are 15,000 official sites on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service (the largest operator portal in Japan) – that’s more sites than mobile ad network AdMob has on its entire global network – and that’s a fraction of the mobile sites in Japan. Everyone else benefits too –  for example  McDonald’s Japan mobile site has over 16 million registered users – that’s more than 12 percent of the Japanese population, and its mobile coupon service (two years old) is used by 4.5 million.

69 million Japanese accessed the Internet via their mobile device in 2009. That’s 62 percent of the 111 million mobile subscribers in Japan, more than twice the percentage in the US, or the five top nations in Europe.  The global penetration rate for mobile Internet is even lower than this at around 11-12% of mobile subscribers.

So why are they so much better than us. First and foremost, 75 percent of Japanese mobile data users are on flat-rate plans (first introduced in 2004 by au KDDI) so consumers have no fear of bill shock. At over 95 percent, 3G handset penetration is extremely high, and network quality and coverage are both outstanding allowing  rich mobile content and engaging campaigns. The Japanese mobile network operators only take 10 percent of content revenues generated via their mobile portals (which are massive). Furthermore the carriers approach has been “open garden” from the start, where Western carriers tried to keep consumers on their portals.  The standard messaging technology is mobile email, not SMS and MMS (which play no role in Japan), i.e. much richer content and cheaper to send.  Japan has a very homogeneous handset base, as the operators have kept strict control of mobile development. This means developers and marketers don’t have the device fragmentation issues that are getting worse in the US or Europe. Finally, fierce competition for subscribers means very high-spec devices, and that cutting-edge technologies highly relevant to mobile marketing appear in Japan first, then trickle down to other markets.

So it really is not too hard and we really must look beyond a sexy looking iPhone App as the answer.

The answer is out there somewhere let’s just hope the operators take heed and help us out.

I got the style but not the grace

I got the clothes but not the face

I got the bread but not the butter

I got the winda but not the shutter

But I’m big in Japan I’m big in Japan

But Heh I’m big in Japan

“Tom Waites – Mule Variation” 1999

Peter Richards  – April 26th 2010