This morning I was flying from Milan to Rome and, as always, I was looking at which mobile phones people were using and at what they were doing with their mobiles.

I always do this kind of exercise while I found myself in a crowdy place. You will always learn something.

I was in an airport ad that should be a situation where you may find a lot of high educated people, high spenders and, usually, early technology adopters.

I have noticed three people with new mobile phones consulting their agenda to dial a number.

This is quite interesting. They, or their company, spent the money to acquire a high end, just released mobile phones and they are still using the agenda to look at a phone number to dial it. Really. I mean, the old paper agenda with a contact list at the end of the diary.

I felt quite sad looking at them.

We try every single day to push new services and new stuff in mobile phones and people does not use them. I am pushing this to the extreme, I know.

What is the really issue here ? There are several answers to this question.

Maybe the mobile is only a status symbol ad because of this you tend to always the latest model available on the market. This may be a good explanation of what I saw, specially in the Italian market that is so sensible to this kind of issues.

Another explanation is that we make things too difficult for the end user to learn or, simply, they do not need them. Can this be the case of the contact list? This application has been sitting on mobile phone since the beginning. I cannot imagine that some people could not be aware of the presence of such application on their phone.

Anyway this was quite confusing, and scaring and I was wondering if we are going to the right direction. Probably yes, but, what we are doing in not really enough.

If you want to push new applications and services you need to educate your customer. Installing application on the mobile phone is no more enough in order to make them grow with you. You need to have an innovation plan to make your company grow but you also need to have an education innovation plan to hit the market and educate your customer.

The perfect scenario for this should be listening to customers, looking at what they are doing with your products and services and trying to find the best way to make them learn what you are doing.

Why do I blog this? Sort of a personal note.