I recently came across this article and couldn’t resist talking about it see how I have spent the last 6 months helping Nokia plug their Ovi applications store. However as an Ipod and Nokia owner, I know the real value of mobile apps. I use them everyday to check the weather, check train times, find out what’s playing at my local cinema, find out where I am or how to get somewhere, check my mail, keep track of time I spend on projects and much more. I keep discovering new apps all the time to the point where I feel I am actually getting some kind of mobile app overload happening.

As a dad however, I can appreciate the idea of a application that translates a baby’s cries into something more understandable like, “I’m hungry, feed me.”

I remember reading baby books which all mentioned how mothers eventually can tell the difference between one cry and another. But what about dads? To me a screech was a screech. Sure I could tell the difference between a mild night disturbance versus a baby in pain, but these are extremes. It’s all those cries in between that drive you mad with uncertainty and anxiety. After all, you want the little one to be happy all the time. You want to protect and make them feel special. But how can you do that when you have no idea what’s wrong?

Well, for all the new dads out there, I truly hope this mobile app from Biloop Technologic works. Just one word of advice however, if your wife doesn’t know  why the baby is crying and you do because of this application, don’t tell her. She will hate you for it. Instead find a clever way to “lead her” to find the reason that you already know thanks to this application.

As a marketer I am however surprised that the brand managers for Pampers or Johnson & Johnson’s didn’t think of this first. What a huge missed opportunity to create lasting brand value. Didn’t anybody pay attention to Kraft’s success?

IPhone Application Translates Babies’ Howls

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Well, one solution is to create smart branded utilities. Capitalizing on the iPhone wave sweeping the Western world, Kraft, or one of their smarter agencies, have cleverly created one of the most functional mobile branded utilities to date, the iFood Assistant. The application is packed with over 7000 of Kraft’s recipes.

Now, followers of Kraft’s marketing story will know that Kraft has been one of the latent players in the digital game. However, over the years, they have stubbornly stuck to their traditional belief that the only value add they can give consumers online is recipes. As any food fan will tell you however, the Internet is swamped with free recipes. So it’s hardly a value adding strategy or even differentiator in the crowded online space.

In the mobile world however, recipes barely exists, unless you have some painfully slow GPRS access to Orange World perhaps (though that’s just a guess really).

By porting their recipes into the mobile medium, especially one as sexy as the iPhone, they have created a piece of branded utility that now only makes a lot of sense for the brand, but a very attractive utility for the consumer. As an amateur gourmet cook myself, I can tell you what a pain in the neck it is to find a template recipe to create a new dish from. Searching for the right recipe on Google is tedious at best. And using books results in the same boring dishes. Mobile access to 7000 recipes gives you near endless variety. More importantly, it gives you them where you need it, at the grocers while you hunt for ingredients!

But this great convenience is not why I am writing about the iFood Assistant. As a piece of marketing, it’s a great case study. First, Kraft sells this application via the iTunes application store for $0.99. According to an Apple iPhone for the enterprise case study, Kraft claims a seven-figure download for their little application. At a buck a pop, that’s a million bucks. Now I can tell you it didn’t cost them a million to make this application and place some promotions and PR on the web. So what you have is a nice little piece of successful new web marketing that not only gets and keeps the consumer’s interest, but also turns a tidy little profit for the marketing department. 

And this is the future of marketing really. No longer should marketing be considered a cost-centered. In the coming years, CEO’s are going to start asking Marketing Directors to tell them what kind of profit returns they can expect from their departments, rather than just asking for brand sales projections.

For more information: 

http://www.kraftfoods.com/kf/iFood.aspx

http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/kraft-foods.html