The ‘Determined Creep’ of mobile customer engagement

Blink and you might miss it – The Tipping Point for mobile customer engagement might be upon us quicker than we thought.If, like me you are reading Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant new book ‘What the Dog Saw’ you will have come across the term ‘creeping determinism’, a concept attributed to psychologist Baruch Fischhoff who first came up with it thirty five years ago. The principle states that as time goes by we start to convince ourselves that what has now happened was in fact always going to happen. Furthermore, through this process of enlightened hindsight, we convince ourselves so entirely, that any doubt we may have had upfront diminishes and is lost from our memory.

I am currently developing my own theory that what is happening today in the mobile channel will someday be explained by people in businesses with the benefit of creeping determinism.

CScape’s annual Customer Engagement report, published at the end of last year included a section on mobile which kicked off with the heading ‘Mobile is at a very embryonic stage’. The heading was drawn from data that revealed 90 per cent of companies surveyed were either not investing in mobile at all or only in a limited way. Certainly organisations could be forgiven for choosing their investment strategy more cautiously on the back of a global recession, but on 14 January Vodafone still delivered 50,000 iPhone handsets to its customers from a combination of first day and pre-orders. On 20 January the UK national gamers survey report also revealed that 3.8 million mobile gamers had managed to spend £170 million last year.

Gladwell uses creeping determinism to describe the post event analysis of the intelligence services mistakes in the run up to the 9/11 attacks. He refers to the Shelby report’s use of the expression “failing to connect the dots” when referring to the various pieces of missed evidence that were in the intelligence services hands. In defence of the intelligence service Gladwell explains that the sheer volume of noise level intelligence can make it extremely difficult to sift out what is real and what is not.

Where I struggle with the reticence surrounding mobile adoption and investment is that a comparable degree of noise level intelligence is not making the dots harder to connect – it is providing information at such volume that the picture is already drawn for us.

Every year the IAB predicts that this is the year of mobile, or at least asks whether or not it will be. Sooner or later of course it will be right and perhaps that evidence will be referred to with the benefit of hindsight and everyone will wonder why no one listened to the message. People on the inside are saying it. Some people in business are even saying it. But most importantly of all, consumers are ‘behaving it’ and the evidence is mounting everywhere that you care to look.

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