Developing A New Smartphone Application: Urbanbaby Case Studies Example

Judging by the information above, the application has a great potential to become, first of all, popular and, secondly, profitable. However, there’s one thing missing, without which Alex and Pavel won’t be able to reach their goals and populate the app finally entering the U.S. market. It is marketing mix, or, in other words, strategies and tactics that programmers should use to achieve results. Alongside with this problem, there’s another one – inability to determine the target audience.
Basically, it is very important to build the target audience and one characteristic, which is about ‘being parents’, is not enough. The target audience should be built based on at least 5 characteristics to get a comprehensive profile of an average app user. The research on target audience will also be useful. Afterward, having understood the target audience, it is worth paying attention to the marketing strategy or marketing mix. First of all, it is the product itself that matters. Obviously, since the statics have shown that Android is gaining the popularity, programmers should create the app version for Android in parallel with the further development of the version for IPhones. The similarity in naming shouldn't be a big problem until it violates any rules and laws. The similarity can be easily turned into the advantage: first, people will easy remember the name of the app and, secondly, it may open doors for the cooperation with www.UrbanBaby.com and, as a consequence, for the promotion of the app. It is worth spending funds to create full and lucrative content to make the basis for promotion and creating the community around the app and making it social. Secondly, the marketing strategy is about promotion. In this regards, Pavel and Alex should work with audiences in all possible networks since there no best social network platform and all possible social networks will work if they don't want to miss their target audience. Word-of-mouth should work perfectly in the promotion of the application. Thirdly, there goes pricing for the web. They may take the experience of the UrbanSpoon as an example, making UrbanBaby free and using ads. Further, they may think of additional new features to be added to the app that could be installed only for money, but here it may be worth creating a rewarding system, so as users can get some points and further exchange them at the place of the chosen activity for bonuses.
Anyway, there’s much left to be desired in Alex and Pavel’s business management, but it should be said that without knowing the target audience and without reacting to the increasing popularity of the Android OS, it will be difficult to get a reward for a very useful application. Without a clear and result-oriented marketing strategy the mobile app will hardly enter not only the U.S. market but other local markets in Canada. As the result, the mobile app may simply fail.