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For almost as long as mobile phones and text messaging have been around, people have been predicting the death of SMS marketing. There are, in fact, reasons to suppose that the future of SMS is more secure than many other types of marketing.

Mobile advertisers now spend an average of $9.46 for a registered user and up to $16.01 for sharing the app content. And costs will continue to skyrocket.

This year will see the realization of new retail formats that harness emerging trends at their best, and luxury brands will need to decide how they will work with these new formats.

To industry pundits and casual observers, it came as a shock this week when Apple projected that growth for its iPhone sales would hit the slowest pace since 2007, the year of the iconic phone’s release.

With live-streaming of fashion shows the norm, the buzz that a brand can create is little more than the 12 minutes of its duration, and then we are all onto the next event.

Since digital media platforms have come into existence, sports brands have used them as mechanisms to shout to their audience. This has resulted in a megaphone for teams and leagues to tell their stories. The conversation has essentially been a one-way experience where teams would hope that fans would find them.

Your effectiveness as a marketer or retailer of true luxury products or services could be substantially influenced by your answer to this question.

Last year was another banner year for mobile. Mobile search overtook desktop for the first time, heralding the smartphone as the connected digital device of choice. We also saw further market penetration for new mobile platforms such as wearables and mobile pay.

China has declared a national holiday this year from Feb. 7-13, which paves the way for the massive travel that corresponds to Chinese New Year, known as the 40-day Chunyun period. This is also the largest human migration in the world, with more than 3.7 billion trips made during the Chunyun period in 2015.

When it comes to online commerce, the point at which money changes hands has often been the moment a sale falls apart. What was a carefully crafted brand experience becomes off-putting and complicated. There are confusing redirects, forms that clash with the rest of the design, and a lot of sensitive data that needs to be entered.

It is no secret that hotels have had their Web-based business swiped from under their noses by the likes of Priceline, owner of Kayak and Booking.com. Now the preferred destination for hotel visitors online despite not owning any property or producing anything, Priceline has a bigger market value than the top 15 hotel groups combined.

Retailers made great strides, baby steps and big gaffs in the march toward SMS marketing excellence this past holiday season. Here is a recap of ideas to emulate or avoid.

The Indian luxury landscape is experiencing strong evolutionary undercurrents that are redefining the consumer profile and how luxury players will need to operate in this domain during 2016.

Smart watches offer a promising new customer touch point for retailers and financial services companies, but any successful effort to use them in your business will depend strongly on having a laser focus on the simplicity and utility of your application’s design.

Many still consider ad networks to be in an amateur state, and mobile marketing in its infancy. Over the coming years, the marketing community will be able to leverage greater value from information gleaned from users’ mobile devices, enabling more precise and effective marketing than ever before.

While mall owners blame the trend on the closing of anchor stores such as Macy’s, the real reason behind the demise of malls is that shoppers, especially the high-potential affluent customers, have lost interest.

Despite Google’s prediction that 85 percent of the top 100 retailers will have beacon technology in place by the end of 2016, true mainstream adoption on either side is still probably a couple of years away.

In the United States, mobile devices account now for 30 percent of retail commerce, while sales are expected to total over $100 billion.

Authenticity is an overrated term in the marketing and advertising industry. As marketers, we all vie for that deep relationship between our brand and our consumers, but many campaigns seem to fall flat.

This will be a fascinating and pivotal year for mobile’s role in marketing. But there will be opportunities as well as challenges.

The real news is the slowdown in China’s growth and the devaluation of the RMB.