Mobile App Strategy: Add Value to Existing Innovation

There's a lot of apps out there already.

Consumers are hungry for the latest and greatest thing, and often that can translate into anything that makes their lives easier. Instead of adding new products to your lineup, consider how a mobile app might give new value to your existing success stories.

Your business is starting to think about the evolution of technology and how you can support existing goals with a mobile app strategy. Often this means looking toward what new things you could be doing, when the best approach is to consider how your existing innovations can be supported.

Mark Bonchek of the Harvard Business Review supports this suggestion by recommending you build on your current product offering: “Companies that successfully market and sell innovation are able to shift how people think not only about their product, but about themselves, the market, and the world.” Loosely translated, Bonchek is suggesting that instead of inventing a new wheel, you get mileage from the existing ones -- use your mobile app strategy to encourage consumers to reconsider your products and services in new ways.

Bonchek discusses three details that your organization must evaluate prior to moving forward:

• PRESENT. What is your business doing well? Review the pain points that your current solutions solve for your customers -- no matter what mobile-centric additions you introduce, you do not want to risk any existing wins that you have in place.

• FUTURE, What are your goals? Whether you have a service offering that could be sold to a new mobile-centric market or an existing product that could be complemented by a mobile-app companion, consider what problems you are trying to solve. The answers to these questions will help you to understand the potential benefits of your next solution in a way that will help you sell it effectively to your clients and consumers.

• TRANSITION. Defining the steps required to bring your project from the present to the future is the easy part: knowing the start and end points means you only need to determine the steps in between. This is the point where you put together the roadmap that will guarantee your vision matches the result.

Above all else, the goal of your organization has to remain to serve your audience well. To accomplish this, heed the advice of Beth Comstock, the Chief Marketing Officer of GE, in the same HBR article, who advises adopting the strategy of “mindshare before market share.” This mantra reminds us that any new project is a journey and that having a great idea isn’t enough: you want it to be able to turn someone from “disinterested to enthusiastic.”

When you’ve got your game plan ready to go, begin development of your mobile app using Progress® Pacific™. Using this high-productivity, cloud application development platform, you will be ready to deliver powerful, data-driven mobile apps faster.