MOBILE FOCUS: Renaud Besnard says,
Mobile devices have become so commonplace that individuals that aren’t connected to the Internet in one way or another have become a kind of “endangered species”.
But what’s even more fascinating to companies such as Google Inc is the fact that many consumers
have now chosen to use their mobile devices as their primary mode for going online.
“In the past, we used to talk about the world going mobile first, but that’s already done. What’s interesting is that the world is now going mobile only,” says Renaud Besnard, marketing director for Southeast Asia at Google Inc.
Currently, he says there are around three billion people globally who are online and out of that figure, two billion of them are on smartphones.
“Five years from now, we’re going to see around four billion people online and just as many of them on smartphones,” he says.
Besides that, he points out that the next generation of Internet users have emerged. Those who fall under this category are those who have never used a PC to connect to the Internet before and whose Web experiences have come solely from smart devices.
Connection point
Based on trends that Google has observed in Malaysia lately, Besnard feels that Malaysia ought to be viewed as an emerged market rather than an emerging one.
“You have great connectivity and good infrastructure here,” he says.
He shares that Malaysian consumers “are moving away from traditional offline media and into online media”. In addition, he says many consumers are now seeking to stream content from their mobile devices back onto larger screens, such as that of a smart TV.
“What we’re also seeing today is that there has been a huge growth in the number of hours that people are watching YouTube. This has been fuelled by more people watching on their mobile devices,” he says.
Besnard adds that search query volumes via mobile platforms have also been growing steadily.
“It’s a very interesting trend and it reinforces our view that we (Google) need to think about the mobile consumer first,” he says.
From a business perspective, Besnard sees consumers’ growing dependence on the mobile platform as a good thing. This is because it opens up a lot of new avenues for companies to connect with its customers.
“Users will increasingly consume media and interact on social networks through their mobile devices,” he says.
“For us as marketers, this actually presents us with great opportunities because we have never been able to reach out to so many different people through a device that is always with them and is intimately connected to their daily lives.”
However, he says it is really up to each company to make the most of the mobile experience that they offer to consumers and to ensure that it remains relevant to their needs.
In general, Besnard feels that most tech organisations, including Google, have made “slow progress” in responding to this environment of “absolute mobility”.
He says that Google has had its own share of failed attempts along the way, simply because the products they developed were “not good enough for the mobile centric consumer”.
However, he says that these past experiences have served the company well and has set in motion a process of “creative destruction”. Certain functionalities that had been well liked from the past have now been recycled to create better products and services.
“It taught us about what it takes to provide the right services to consumers,” he says.
Democratisation of devices
Over at Google, Besnard shares that the company’s emphasis continues to be on enhancing speed, universality of access and putting the needs of users first.
As for its mobile offerings, there are three areas that the company focuses on: hardware, services and user engagement.
In terms of its hardware, Besnard says the company seeks to contribute towards the “democratisation of devices to help people come online for the first time”.
“We did not initially start off as a hardware company, but we’re now really interested in this space. The Internet is synonymous for knowledge and information and there’s a great digital divide in terms of the level of access that people have to that information,” he says.
He says this is the reason behind the launch of products such as Android One, which is targeted at consumers in emerging markets who face obstacles to owning a smartphone.
Meanwhile, with regards to services, Besnard says YouTube remains a key focus for Google.
He adds that Google also provides tools such as Google My Business to benefit small and medium businesses (SMBs) by “encouraging them to create their online presence”.
“A lot of them (SMB owners) simply do not have the resources, time or inclination to do so,” he explains. “We are working with different partners to bring simple and cost effective solutions to them.”
Lastly, with regards to user engagement, Besnard says Google now designs its new products and services with the mobile platform in mind first, as opposed to how it used to be previously whereby the experience on PCs had been the point of emphasis.
“This really exemplifies a shift in the spirit of the business. We are placing mobile at the heart of everything we do: the products we create, the services we offer and the way we talk to consumers and businesses,” he says.
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