PERSONALIZATION, PERMISSION, AND SPECIFICATION
Personalization
M-commerce firms can link stated individual characteristics with a user -centric database. Although such linkages can be made in traditional e-commerce, they go further and deeper in m-commerce. Through relational links with mobile phone usage databases and to geographic positioning data, the scope and depth of a user-centric m-commerce database can be much greater than in the case of conventional e-commerce. M-commerce systems, thus, provide a perfect platform for delivering one-to-one marketing.
Personalization is about creating services that tailor the end-user experience to the idiosyncratic needs of the individual subscriber. In m-commerce, intelligent personalization platforms can be devised to learn from both user preferences and past behavior of the user. There are, of course, challenges in terms of optimizing the interaction path , enabling users to reach the services they want with as few buttons as possible, and presenting information in a compact form scaled for the smaller CIP device. Since the CIP device that enables access also serves as the customer's wallet (M ƒ ¼ller-Veerse, 1999), m-commerce platforms can also serve as universal payment systems. Overall, m-commerce applications have the potential to provide a much more comprehensive and intelligent level of personalization than e-commerce applications.
There are of course risks associated with enhanced levels of personalization. Losing the mobile CIP device could have consequences that are worse than losing a wallet. That is why security and authentication have taken on a renewed urgency in m-commerce settings (Wolverton, 2002). In the design of 3G devices, for example, strict security standards have to be incorporated.
Permission
Extending the Peppers and Rogers (1993) work on one-to-one marketing to the e-commerce arena, Godin (1999) introduced the concept of "permission marketing" to refer to a way of approaching customers intimately and personally by obtaining prior permission regarding the types of communications they would like to receive. In distinguishing older forms of marketing ‚ disparagingly termed as "interruption marketing" ‚ from permission marketing, Godin states:
Interruption Marketers spend all of their time interrupting strangers, in an almost pitiful attempt to bolster popularity and capture attention. Permission Marketers spend as little time and money talking to strangers as they can. Instead, they move as quickly as they can to turn strangers into prospects who choose to "opt-in" to a series of communications.
To be really useful, m-commerce applications require a much more comprehensive scope and depth of permission than e-commerce applications. For instance, m-commerce users must give permission to use their geographical location to pinpoint nearest service delivery points and also give permission to charge their purchases and service usage fees to their mobile network accounts or to prespecified credit or debit cards.
Specification
In e-commerce, distinctions have emerged between the "home" and "work" roles of users. In many instances, users are free to use any type of e-commerce services from their home terminals but are barred from using personal services, such as shopping or browsing pornography, by the firewalls surrounding their office terminals. M-commerce challenges these distinctions. Questions such as the following arise: Is it possible to determine whether the individual is at work (on duty) or not (off duty)? Is it even preferable or necessary to maintain this distinction? If the segmenting, targeting, and positioning strategies for m-commerce are approached using the traditional distinctions between B2B and B2C marketing, this could create confusion and problems. M-commerce providers have to serve the user in multiple roles (on duty/off duty) and at varying locations (home/work/traveling/shopping/elsewhere) in a dynamic fashion. M-commerce portals have to be ready to handle the user's dynamic specification of the role-location combination s/he prefers . In some cases, the m-commerce provider will have to dynamically infer the role-location specification, depending on the context of the interaction. And in still other cases, the m-commerce merchant would specify the segmentation style, and the m-commerce portal would have to handle such merchant-specified role-location combination. Thus, the m-commerce portals will have to become "dynamic specification hosts ". To become an effective and efficient specification host, the m-commerce portal will have to gather a lot of valuable , owner-specific information as well as service-capability and timing information from service and content providers.
Revisiting the M-Commerce/E-Commerce Distinctions
Based on the foregoing discussion about personalization, permission, and specification, some further distinctions between m-commerce and e-commerce can be made (see Table 2). In essence, m-commerce extends and elaborates the potential of personalization, permission, and specification that e-commerce provides. Without substantial extensions of these three dimensions, the very rationale of m-commerce becomes questionable. Just as a fixed telephone system with widely dispersed private and public phones cannot fully substitute for a system with universal mobile telephony, similarly an e-commerce system with a wide distribution of terminals cannot fully substitute for a fully developed m-commerce system. Just as mobile telephony represents a wholly distinct communication pattern from fixed telephony, so does m-commerce represent a wholly distinct transaction system from e-commerce.
| Dimension | E-Commerce | M-Commerce |
|---|---|---|
| PERSONALIZATION | ||
| User-centric database | Slow Evolution: Evolves from navigation and transaction behavior of the user | Fast Evolution: Evolves from daily communications and linking of multiple databases |
| Tailoring of services and content | Somewhat Limited: Depends on inferences about user's preferences, roles | Possibly Extreme: User revealed preferences, inferred roles and preferences, and location factors can be used to tailor offerings |
| Learning and intelligence | Limited: Based on collaborative filtering, profiling | Extensive: Based on collaborative filtering, profiling applied to multiple databases |
| PERMISSION | ||
| Scope of permission | Relatively Narrow: Merchant-specific, defined in User Agreement | Relatively Broad: Often unspecific and location based |
| Depth of permission | Relatively Shallow: Very specific transactions and charges are permitted | Relatively Deep: Extensive range of transactions and payments are permitted |
| SPECIFICATION | ||
| Role demarcation | Sharp: Especially in firewalled work environments | Blurred: Difficult to tell whether user is on or off duty |
| Nature of role specification | Static: Determined by the location of the client terminal | Dynamic: Depends on user preferences, merchant preferences, and geographic location |
| Service or content specification | Somewhat Configurable: Depends on client terminal IP address and revealed user identity | Evolving and Dynamic: Depends on user preferences, merchant capabilities, location characteristics |
| Source: Authors' research | ||
The distinctions between m-commerce and e-commerce create different strategic imperatives for each of these Internet-based systems of commerce. We turn our attention now to the strategic imperatives for m-commerce, based mainly on the dynamic impacts of personalization, permission, and specification.
