KPN: Right Here, Right Now

The explicit assignment is to develop an international marketing and communication program that enables KPN to reach one million i-mode users in 2003 across the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. The underlying choice is more fundamental: growth does not come from persuasion, but from organizing participation.

The key insight is that mobile adoption accelerates when people become part of the medium, not only as consumers of content, but as makers, connectors and distributors. That requires a different role for marketing: not managing reach, but creating room for use, expression and interaction.

From this insight, we develop a strategic framework that positions i-mode as a cultural and creative platform. The organizing idea Right Here, Right Now organizes everything. Mobile is personal, local and immediate. This is where its power sits.
We set up the i-mode Marketing Lab as a creative incubator where technology, culture and brands meet. The Lab becomes the engine of the program and the place where new forms of mobile content, collaboration and community are created and tested. From this environment, we develop i-go.nl, a platform that transforms i-mode from infrastructure into participation.

With the i-go Sitebuilder, anyone can create an i-mode site in minutes. Users become makers. Within nine months, more than three hundred partner sites and two thousand personal sites emerge. Brands, creators and users build mobile content side by side, driven by actuality, location and personal relevance.

Partnerships form with a wide range of brands, cultural initiatives and societal organizations, not as sponsorship, but as co-creation under one shared principle. i-mode becomes visible in daily life: on the street, at events and in communities.
Embedding is not in isolated activations, but in the system itself. i-go is designed as an open community in which creativity keeps multiplying. Success in the Netherlands becomes the basis for rollout to Belgium and Germany, where i-go grows into an international ecosystem of local initiatives and cross-border collaboration.

The impact goes beyond growth alone. Well before the breakthrough of social media, this trajectory shows how mobile internet can function as participatory culture. i-go becomes an early blueprint of a connected world in which users, platforms and brands create meaning together.