KPMG have released the results of a global survey into attitudes to mobile content. Well, they say ‘global’, but the survey was of 3,576 mobile phone users (which represents 0.0000549747696277206% of the world’s population…)

What’s interesting is one of the conclusions reached: That consumers are not willing to pay for premium content.

In all such sureys, analyst reports and polls, one clear thing stands out to me: The type of content being discussed is the type of content that can be obtained from other sources, in other forms, free of charge, and is almost entirely ‘passive’ content, content that is created once and provided to a wide range of customers in a passive way - download, browsing, alert etc.

What’s never discussed is the willingness of people to pay a premium for personalised content, a type of content of great interest to me as my company provides this kind of service. For example, our GTIP service provides a personalised response based on a customer query. It’s like customer support, but it’s for everyone’s products, not just one company’s product, and it’s about providing help to enjoy the product rather than support when the product breaks.

The relationship here is a one to one relationship between the content and the customer, not a one to many relationship. Each piece of content is created specifically for the customer, based on her query. At the same time the content is small, portable, quite often of great interest to the requester’s friends.

But the important thing is something that a lot of mobile compnay’s are starting to realise:It’s not about selling as much content as possible int he shrotest amount of time, it’s about retaining customers by providing them with what they want.

From a purely economic point of view it’s better to retain a customer who buys from you 2, or 5, or (in the case of one of my customers, more than 500 times) is more valuable than someone who buys something once and then moves on.

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