To Fix Anything, You Must be Able to Define "What is Broken?" In Mobile Payments, We Don't Know, Yet

Lots of consumer innovations and products fail. Some might say the failure rate is 50 percent to 90 percent or even higher. Given that track record, one would have to be skeptical about prospects for any of the proposed new mobile payment, mobile commerce or mobile wallet systems. Even if any of those efforts ultimately do manage to change the shopping, buying or paying experience, most of the current iterations will not survive.

So having a clear understanding of precisely what is to be fixed might be worthwhile. Some of us have argued that the retail, in-store payments process, in fact, is "not broken." Retailers would prefer not to pay as much as they presently do to conduct the transactions. Payment processors would like to protect those transaction revenues.

But "paying for things" doesn't seem, in North America, to be something that causes consumers lots of difficulty. Nor is the ultimate potential reshaping necessarily clear. Up to this point, there has been a clear emphasis on changing the "retail" payments process. But retail shopping is clearly under serious pressure from online alternatives.

Best Buy is moving away from the "big box" business model as online competitors continue to chip away at the formerly-successful business model. Some might question the long-term potential of the moves, as many likewise would question whether Barnes & Noble can survive as an operator of retail locations as well.

That is not to say all retailers are destined to disappear. But many "big box" approaches might not work as well as they have in the past. Some might argue the only long-term model is the "Apple Store," where the object is to showcase merchandise and explain, educate or demonstrate its use, not "sell" it. That will have "payment process" implications, as many customers might "purchase" in new ways other than standing in front of a cashier operating a traditional point of sale terminal.

But there are other implications for mobile commerce as well. If fewer retailers are selling products, and fewer customers are "buying" in many retail settings, what does that mean for all the effort going into mobile payment terminals, applications and systems? Will the mobile device assume an important new role as a device to show the product catalog?

Will the mobile increasingly become the checkout terminal? At a broader level, how might the "shopping experience" change?

Beyond that, what is "broken" about the commerce, shopping, payment or marketing experience? Unless something is broken, there is no "fix." And if past experience with technology provides any clues, those proposed remedies need to provide a consumer experience that is about 10 times better than the current process.

Also, any proposed new process and experience will involve some amount of end user behavior change. So the pain of enduring the present state of things has to be greater than the pain of adopting the new solutions. It is not yet clear any of those preconditions exist.

It is not enough to say a new way of doing things is "better." It must be an order of magnitude better, and in consumer or end user terms, not in terms of how fast, how powerful, how different the new experience is said to be. Though hard to measure, it is the experience itself that must be an order of magnitude better.