I recently participated in a brainstorm where a story was relayed about an executive that was desperate to come up with a mobile app.  The exec set a goal for the marketing team: “launch a mobile app by the end of this quarter.”  The executive didn’t specify what purpose the app should serve, or the underlying business purpose that drove the need for an app—just that one should be available quickly.

This anecdote raises two things to keep in mind when it comes to mobile:

1.)    The Emergence of Mobile as the New Shiny Object: Social media has held the dubious distinction as the fad of the day for quite some time.  Recently though, mobile seems to be moving up the list as the newest “gotta have it” technology.  It’s easy to see why so many marketing professionals are enamored with the potential of mobile marketing.  By its nature, mobile allows both location-based marketing and opt-in marketing.  It’s far less of a fire hose than the internet at large and presumably provides a more captive audience.  In addition, it’s expected that within the year, 50% of the U.S. will own a smartphone.  More impressively, 72% of physicians currently use smartphones.  Pharmaceutical marketers are tripping over themselves hoping to unleash the silver bullet to communicating with docs.  The mobile app space is dripping with potential and will only continue to grow.  Have you ever known a marketer that turns down potential, growth and functionality?  I haven’t met one yet.   But like the story above, some executives are getting ahead of themselves—forgetting to provide a clear business need for mobile applications.

2.)     Mobile as a Fixed Asset: For all intents and purposes, a mobile app is a fixed asset.  Once it’s launched, making wholesale changes can be difficult so you better get it right on the first shot.  That doesn’t mean you should avoid them all together, but it does underscore the need for a careful and well-planned strategy.  It makes moving forward without a stated business objective a dangerous proposition.  What many executives want, and probably should opt for, is not an app at all.  Instead, executives really want mobile browser functionality that can be launched from an “app” that lives on a mobile device.  This is essentially mobile optimization with an app wrapper—it  gets the job done.

By and large, mobile is an untapped frontier for healthcare companies.  It has obvious applications for patient adherence, direct-to-patient communication, communicating recall information, connecting with doctors, enabling the sales force with better content, etc.  But like any new initiative, the strategy has to justify the tool, not the other way around.

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