Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: That’s just looking at the altimeter and your pitch and yaw. You can see the data. You can intellectualize, “Gee. I’m on a slight up-climb, here. I’m not level.” But where does it register if I keep on this? Where do you take action, based on this metaphor? If you climb at a certain rate, at some point, you stall.

TW: Correct. Before that happens, you’ve got a stall alarm that’s going, “Whoop, whoop, whoop,” and…

MM: They put the stall alarm in there because a lot of pilots were not paying attention. They didn’t take action on the data.

TW: Correct. So you put in a stall alarm.

MM: What are those in a marketing analytics perspective?

TW: You need to determine those. People need to try to set boundary conditions around what would look to be normal behavior in terms of their data and what wouldn’t be. The only way you can do that is experientially.

The same way, if I took your metaphor about learning to fly, Michael — people get to the point of being able to trust their instruments and fly at night or fly through a cloud, because they’ve had enough experience as they’ve been learning to fly to know that the instruments aren’t lying.

From the analytics perspective, we want to say to people, “Don’t worry about how this thing works. Tell me what you think would be unacceptable behavior at the top end and what would be unacceptable behavior at the bottom end. We’ll work together to gradually refine those, or make them wider or do whatever it is we need to do with them, so that you can look at this in a way that’s intuitive to you.”

That’s a huge step forward. We could talk about brand franchise value and deltas on impression rates from cross-media sources. People would pay attention to that. But people who reading an article about the mechanics or listening to a podcast would go to sleep.

MM: That’s right.

TW: I think where I still haven’t got my head sorted out is around the mobile space, in terms of that.

MM: Yes.

As a footnote, you sell some $600 million of products a year through mobile users?

TW: $600 million through web and mobile. Slightly more than half of that is mobile.

MM: That makes Amway Japan one of the largest mobile transaction mobile commerce sites in the world.

TW: I guess. I haven’t thought about it, but I suppose. There are other websites-mobile sites-in Japan that would be of similar size.

MM: But from an American or Western Hemisphere perspective, you’ve already hit the wall and worked through a whole bunch of issues that people are now beginning to address or don’t even know are around the corner for them.

TW: Sure. We had to.

MM: What are some of the things you’ve learned in the mobile marketing and mobile content space as a quick reprise of the last 3 or 4 years? Then, moving forward, what are the things you see?

TW:I’m glad you asked the second question. I’m not really interested in history.

I think the first thing people have to realize about the mobile-particularly in the North Asian environment and I’m referencing Taiwan, Japan and Korea - what I’ve found is that it gives us the ability to port applications. That’s a whole other conversation.

These things are ubiquitous. People do not use them for telephone conversations anymore. People use their mobile phones for digital interaction with the world.

In Japan, as an example of consumer behavior with the mobile phone-let’s say you’re in an equivalent of a Wal-Mart. You walk up and there’s a range of products there with a barcode. You take a photograph of the barcode with your mobile phone and it reaches out to the website of that particular product. It pulls back the ingredients, the suggested uses and the price per gram or whatever it is. The information that you’re after.

At the same time, as you walk past the checkout in the convenience store with your can of Coke, the store register charges your mobile phone account for that can of Coke. And as you walk onto the train, your mobile phone bills you for the train ticket and then gives you broadband access. It knows where you got on and where you got off and charges you accordingly.

We needed to understand that people want to use their mobile phone in those economic interactions as a tool.

MM: Terry, this gets to a conversation that we had a while ago around how most people have two hands. Yet there’s a new cohort that has a third digital hand.

TW: Sure.

MM: It’s quite literally an extension of their core identity. They make no distinction between the mobile device and themselves. Or the interaction. They assumed that everything-It’s just like, “Well, I reach out and I touch it and I get it.”

TW: Absolutely. The mobile phone is my identity to the world. It’s the way I interact with the world. It’s always within a yard of me.

MM: Yes.

TW: It’s always on. It knows where I am. It knows what I’m doing. And it serves as a metaphor for interaction with the real world. It’s amazing. In Japan, right now, one of the most popular new trends that emerged in 2007-mobile blogging.

MM: Yes.

TW: I mean-get out of here! So you’ve got kids-typically under 30 years of age-sitting on a subway or at a Starbucks or somewhere else. They’re writing their blogs from their mobile phones. They’re uploading it to the servers. When they get home at night, they’ll upload their photographs onto their PCs or elsewhere. This thing is an extension of who they are.

Imagine Facebook. Imagine Blogger. Imagine all of these things replicated over a mobile network. Imagine walking past a bus stop that’s got an advertisement on it, and it says, “Hey, Michael. What flavor pizza do you want me to deliver when you get home?” And it knows when you’re about to get home or when you go through 3 or 4 waypoints, because the phone cells are picking up your location.

It’s ubiquitous. That’s the future of where this whole thing is headed. How do we as marketers understand the implications of ubiquity? I don’t know the answer to that. I wish I did. I’d make a zillion dollars if I did.

MM: You’ve learned some things. Right? What are some of the things you’ve learned as a marketer in that space?

TW: The first thing we’ve learned is the transactional piece. The mobile phone is ideally suited for transactions. Just make sure that you’re providing people with photographs rather than SKU numbers. That took a little while for us to learn. SKU numbers are typically like 9 digits long, and people type them in wrong.

But primarily, the first thing to understand is that the mobile is a transactional engine. Make sure the transaction is smooth and seamless, and as fast as possible for the user.

It doesn’t matter whether you queue that data up on a server somewhere-as long as to the user, it’s transparent and fast.

What we’re seeing now is that video delivered over the mobile phone network is a far more powerful selling tool than text. Obviously. But in the Japanese-North Asian-environment where you have 4G phones picking up live-to-air broadcasts from the television stations as well as dedicated mobile TV stations-you really have to have high-quality video in order to make an impact on people.

The other thing that we’re finding with mobile telephone or mobile computers… let’s call them computers, because that’s what they are. These things have got more memory than our Apple 2Es ever had. Right?

MM: Yes.

TW: They’re wonderful for impulse transactions. Remember, the mobile phone knows who you are. It’s got a credit limit on it. It knows where you are. If you begin to think about some of the implications that has for retail environments-I think that it would blow the top of your head off.

It’s got a chip in it that automatically identifies you. Let’s not worry about getting an RFID chip injected under our forearm. Let’s not worry about what it says on my hat about who I am. The world knows who I am. Think of the privacy implications of that sort of thing.

But again, for a marketer, I think the first lesson that people have got to take onboard and really think through is to remember -this thing is always on, and it’s typically always within a yard.

MM: Right.

TW: So you have 24/7 always-on 2-way communication with consumers.

MM: In your dashboard, what sort of things would you have show up in the dashboard relative to your mobile point of presence?

TW: Right now, we track in real-time the interaction that we’re having with customers in their transactional piece. That’s it.