Mobile is just another touchpoint - important yes - a game changer - no

The head of Next, a UK fashion supplier, talks a lot of sense

In Marketing Week he is reported as saying: “I don’t think mobile will be the key to getting consumers to spend. I think its overall impact will probably be marginal. It is important we get it right as consumers are shopping in a new way and we are getting it right by upgrading various elements of our user interface and digital marketing. But I don’t think any of these steps will be game-changing, they are all just small improvements."

To me it seems like common sense. You have to have been living under a stone not to realise that mobile transactions are important but so are another 20-30 touchpoints in the customer journey.

I am concerned, as I think is the guy from Next, that marketers see mobile as a panacea, just as social media was (and still is) as was having an app as was, at the beginning of the digital age, having a web site.

The trick is getting all of the touchpoints to work to an acceptable, preferably outstanding, level.

Certainly, if you consider how many older people use smartphones to make a purchase then it puts the touchpoint into some sort of context. The number is very low.

It is probably more important to get the quality of the way the digital channel resolves on a tablet right since so many older people are moving to tablets as their sole source of Internet connection. Dick Stroud