Mobile marketing has been rightly championed as an effective means to raise a brand’s profile and create dialogue between brands and people. The combination of a device that almost everyone owns, the promise of being able to target highly intelligently, and the power of a two-way communications vehicle, offers brands the chance to create new and innovative ways to communicate and increase awareness.

However, questions have been asked about why brand holders have not invested significantly in mobile marketing to date. There are various reasons, but one of the initial hurdles that brands seem to have struggled with is the creation of consumer trust.

The issue of trust is broader than simply ensuring communications are relevant to the audience, timely and non-intrusive, although all of these issues are important. Even the most effectively targeted marketing message will not convey trust unless it is instantly recognisable as having been sent from a legitimate source.

Consider the millions of spam messages that are sent to email inboxes every day. In each case, the consumer has to make a decision as to whether the communication has come from a legitimate source. I receive upwards of 10 spam emails per week from banks suggesting that my security details have been compromised and requesting that I click on a link to rectify this situation. Fortunately, since most of these come from banks I do not have accounts with, it is easy to discount them as spam. However, this does demonstrate the challenges faced by legitimate organisations who wish to communicate digitally. It is not surprising that the major banks have a blanket policy of never contacting customers through email.

Brand identity
There are ways to overcome these challenges and the proper representation of a company’s brand within communications is one of the most effective ways to achieve this. Human beings are incredibly complex and intuitive individuals, who can recognise the combination of colours, images, straplines and fonts that make up a legitimate brand identity. This is why companies like Virgin and the Easy Group spend so much time and money defending their brand identities. When a brand identity is communicated effectively, it can be immensely powerful. 

The mobile phone has been inherently constrained by a number of factors that can ultimately interfere with brand trust. Among these are a small screen, which offers little space to display branded content effectively; a lower screen resolution; and less memory.

This is further complicated by the variety of different operating systems, handset sizes, screen sizes, colours and fonts that make up the thousands of available mobile devices. Downloaded content adds yet another dimension of unpredictability, since the destination does not necessarily display content as the source intended. Branded content that looks perfect on one phone can easily look out of sorts on another.

All of this makes it difficult for the consumer to build trust with a brand. In the email domain, users have come to accept that spam happens. On the mobile phone, a far more personal device than a PC, there is a serious risk that having an unidentifiable brand could be a huge turn-off for the conumer.

Media-rich devices
Things are changing. According to Mediacells, more than 20m UK phone users had a smartphone in their pocket at the end of 2009, and the development of media-rich devices that support data downloads and applications enables the marketing industry to deliver a level of creativity to the mobile platform that was previously considered impossible. Yet this creativity will only be effective if it delivers a consistent and recognisable brand experience to every device. 

One particular aspect, the representation of fonts within mobile, is developing and should play a significant role in helping to bring trust to branded content. Monotype Imaging, with its roots in the type industry, has been working with the mobile industry to adopt the company’s font scaling engine, text layout engine and mobile-optimised fonts for use on handsets. The objective is to provide more flexible font support and to reliably render fonts in a wide range of styles and languages. 

Not only does this offer the ability to more effectively represent a brand in mobile, but it also helps to enable the effective communication of a brand’s identity worldwide. 
Mobile communications, compelling enough to have made their way into the lives of more than 5bn people, have to date been broadly limited to person-to-person communications. As mobile devices become more complex and powerful, the opportunities offered by the medium for business-to-consumer communications are significant. An important part of delivering trust between organizations and individuals comes from clear, identifiable brand communications. Mobile font development will play its part in delivering a more flexible, global and effective solution.

Catherine Lawford is managing director of design agency, Seren