Toyota Launches Chere Mobile Site
Monday, April 14th, 2008
There are at least two things Japan is way ahead of us in, market segmentation and mobile internet. Japan’s cell phones have so much power packed into them that they make an iPhone look like a Univac. They have download speeds comparable to a typical household broadband line that you can access from anywhere you get reception, even as you’re speeding from one side of the city to another on a train. As you can imagine, almost every major company has mobile websites designed to fit on a tiny cell phone screen, accessible via a 3D barcode that you merely scan with the barcode reader every phone is equipped with. No need to type in pesky URLs on a tiny keyboard.
So what about market segmentation? It’s not enough that Toyota has one website describing all their products. No, there has to be many, many sites, each tailored to a specific demographic and/or campaign. Case in point, the Chere mobile site, specifically for women. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cell phone to browse it with.