Hot on the heals of the Mobile Marketing Association coming over all ‘m-retailing’, the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) North America has set up a Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) Initiative all of its own, to help brands, content producers and retailers better understand how to leverage the mobile phone to drive customer acquisition, retention, and conversion.

The first phase of the initiative will produce an educational and informative webinar and M-Commerce Guide that will contain commercial best practices, benefits, and case studies designed to demystify and simplify the mobile commerce landscape.

“There is no more timely and definitive resource,” said Gary Schwartz, CEO of Impact Mobile and Vice Chairman of MEF North America. “Across the US, brands, retailers, and content owners are exploring ways to effectively reach their mobile shopper. The MEF M-Commerce Guide will help these stakeholders to identify ways to drive revenue on the phone or via the phone. This resource will be a good first step to simplify the myriad of options in-market.”

M-Commerce Services make it feasible for businesses to handle an extremely large volume of low cost sales. In addition to purchases like ringtones, music tracks, and games, the growth in micro-payments has come from the purchase of items like car parking and cinema tickets. Additionally, mobile is beginning to impact commerce at bricks-and-mortar POS through incentive and m-couponing programs driving sales and customer retention.

“M-Commerce is a global opportunity and MEF’s initiative shows how the mobile connected device can be leveraged to effectively enable all types of commerce – not just for services and content consumed on the device but also for the purchase of physical products and services,” commented Suhail Bhat, Policies and Initiatives Director for MEF. “The North America guide is the first step in the globalisation of the initiative which will be localised over the coming year in EMEA, Asia, and LATAM.”

On Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 1:00 PM EST MEF Americas will host the webinar titled “Demystifying the World of M-Commerce.” This webinar serves as a precursor to the content which will be contained in the M-Commerce Guide. Register here.

The M-Commerce Guide, to be published next month will include sections on the Mobile State of the Union, Planning, Case Studies, Things to Consider, and What Does the Future Hold. It serves as an essential primer which will be developed as a living document over time. It has been authored with the leadership and invaluable support of the following MEF member companies: 2ergo, AdoStrategies, Billing Revolution, Boku, Engage2Mobile, Impact Mobile, KPMG, mBlox, Motorola, Netbiscuits, Nokia, Polar Mobile, Playphone, RIM, Samsung, Sybase, Synergy Affinity, T-Mobile, and Zong

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