No you don ‘t need an app for that, no matter what the boss thinks
The marketing industry has become obsessed with apps, but Sebastian Pedavoli believes many companies are simply wasting their time.
Everyone wants an app, and I’ve made a few over the past couple of years, including for several global companies, but the question few people ask is why are we making one?
Three years after Apple first launched the App Store for iPhone in 2008, more than 200 million iPhone and iPad users had downloaded more than 15 billion apps. It’s no wonder that companies felt they had to be involved, clamouring to get in front of existing and future customers on the device sitting in their palm.
Today the number of App Store downloads has climbed to 77.5 billion, and the market is estimated to be worth more than $US77 billion by 2017. Yet the ecosystem has become over-crowded and slanted heavily toward the miniscule percentage of apps that make any money, or get any notice from users, versus the vast majority that are downloaded little, if at all.
No idea why platform-specific apps are trendy when a simple HTML app will work on any platform.
Probably results from the saturation of upper-management types who don’t understand the above sentence.
this is great Seb – and I love “this sounds like a no-brainer but…” – if it were so obvious you wouldn’t have to be writing a piece like this!! Good one – thank you.
I am certain that some clients build an app, purely so that they can add another buzzword into their job title on Linkedin.
Joe Bloggs: (Enter swanky marketing title here), followed by: ‘Speaker’ (talked for 10 mins at an industry seminar), ‘Author’ (contributed to a chapter in a book that sold 2 copies; oh but they do blog and tweet though!), ‘Entrepreneur’ (I bet you are…), ‘Disrupter’, (because they are very, very special or can just fck off), ‘All things web and online’ (they built an app that added zero value to the company they were working for at the time…).
And don’t get me started on people who give themselves the title ‘CEO’ when their revenue is minimal and they have less than 5 employees. Time wasters the lot of them.
Thanks Ruby, unfortunately it’s a conversation that happens a little too often.
The Four L’s, we spend a fair amount of time educating clients too. Further to your point, sometimes it can be as simple as clients seeing an app as a golden egg that will solve all their challenges without truely knowing what’s capable or what problem it will solve.
Spot on. And kudos for it coming from a software developer.
Spot on Sebastian, great article. Your closing points sum the current state up perfectly; there is a gold rush for gadgets (namely, apps), which off the back of a few success stories (Uber, Air BnB etc), leads to the inevitable get rich quick types flooding the market with pointless apps. My bigger worry is that typically, a marketer would not simply ask for an app without consulting his or her agency partners (so as to understand its role as part of a larger marketing mix) – that agencies (media, creative, PR or otherwise) are not pushing back and choosing a better path is a worry