28.12.2014 Views

Brand Failures

Brand Failures

Brand Failures

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

Internet and new technology failures 239<br />

84 WAP<br />

Why another protocol<br />

In order to gain public awareness new technologies are now promoted as<br />

brands, by technological companies and organizations. However, often those<br />

technologies that receive the most hype die an early death while those that<br />

are launched with no fanfare gain mass acceptance.<br />

Nowhere has this been more evident than with mobile phone technology.<br />

In Europe, the major mobile phone companies were unable to anticipate the<br />

success of SMS (short messaging service) text messaging. Indeed, some even<br />

failed to mention their phones included an SMS facility. As I explored in my<br />

previous book Mobile Marketing, mobile phone users were left to discover<br />

SMS for themselves – and discover it they did. In the UK alone, over 1 billion<br />

text messages are sent and received every single month.<br />

In Mobile Marketing, I provided an overview of the technology’s popularity:<br />

SMS, or the Short Messaging Service, was the first mainstream technology<br />

to enable short text messages to be sent from one mobile device<br />

to another. Devoid of colour, graphics, audio, video, and confined to<br />

160 characters per message, SMS hardly seemed the most radical of new<br />

media technologies. Furthermore, people wanting to send an SMS text<br />

message had to work with small, fiddly mobile keypads and tiny grey<br />

screens.<br />

Yet, for all its evident shortcomings, SMS became hugely popular and has<br />

inspired a whole generation of ‘textheads’, who have even conjured up their

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!