The Rise of the Mobile Economy and What it Means for our Future

Anindya Ghose is the Professor of IT and Business Analytics at NYU and the author of TAP: Unlocking the Mobile Economy. He is a Professor of IT and a Professor of Marketing, at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He is also the Director of the Center for Business Analytics at NYU Stern. In 2014 he was named by Poets & Quants as one of the “top 40 outstanding business school professors under 40 in the world” and by Analytics Week as one of the “top 200 thought leaders in Big Data and Business Analytics”.
The Mobile Economy is any transaction that occurs on a smart phone or tablet. It is currently more than 3 trillion dollars of the world’s economy – or 4.2% of the world’s GDP. So we are only scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Technology has changed the way companies can interact with consumers. Location accuracy came out about 10 years ago. At that point in time, people’s location could be pin-pointed within 200-300 meters (~1000 feet). Now, the latest smart phones can locate the user within 5 feet. This information opens the door for many uses.
Beyond the retail use, the Mobile Economy touches other industries such as banking, healthcare and construction. Using wearable sensors, workers walking and working patterns can help reshape where workstations should be or even how to design exits or entrances in busy airports.
There are nine forces shaping the Mobile Economy. The first is context which looks at what the customer is thinking. There is also location, time, and weather. Saliency, or the ranking of your product, is also critical. Some other forces that come into play are crowdedness, trajectory, social dynamics and tech mix.
The next generation which includes smart homes and cars are closer than we think. In 2 – 3 years they will include refrigerators that remind you to pick up the groceries on the way home from work. The smart phone will become the remote control for all of your appliances and devices.
Ghose has found four behavior contradictions… people say they:
1. Seek to be spontaneous but really they value certainty
2. Find ads annoying but really they fear being left out, so they want ads
3. Desire choice and freedom but too many choices and they get overwhelmed
4. Want to protect their personal freedom but will use their personal data as currency to get things they want
Ghose’s advice for organizations is if you want to succeed in the Mobile Economy then you have to win the consumer’s trust. You must act as a ‘butler’ not as a ‘creepy stalker’ and you must notify and ask for consent.
His advice for consumers is to embrace the world of messaging and ads. If you do, you will receive lower prices and more targeted messages. If you don’t, you will receive more spam and random messaging with higher prices.

• What is the Mobile Economy?
• Why write a book about the Mobile Economy when the mobile phone has been around for a long time
• The role smart phones will play in the future
• How brick and mortar stores track consumers movements…and why
• Privacy in the Mobile Economy
• How the Mobile Economy is being used to help the healthcare industry
• The 9 forces on the company side that are shaping the mobile economy
• The 4 behavior contradictions on the consumer side

My new book, The Employee Experience Advantage (Wiley, March 2017) analyzes over 250 global organizations to understand how to create a place where people genuinely want to show up to work. Subscribe to the newsletter here.