Why does engagement matter? Because it drives customer satisfaction, utility and value.

And, according to Walgreens senior director of mobile commerce Tim McCauley, the best way to foster engagement with customers is through a multichannel marketing approach with mobile at its core.

This was a sentiment echoed by, well, nearly everyone who spoke last week at the Mcommerce Summit: State of Mobile Commerce 2013, organized by Mobile Commerce Daily.

Locaid CEO, Rip Gerber, recently sat down with Derek Johnson, founder & CEO of Tatango  to talk about the explosion of mobile marketing over the last couple of years. Tatango is an interesting company in the SMS marketing space. I’ve been speaking with  Derek and his company for a few months now and have been impressed with their early market traction with location-based SMS campaigns.

As the number of Americans with smartphones passes the halfway mark this year, retailers have an opportunity to directly engage with their customers and go on the offensive against “Showrooming,” a trend in which consumers use their smartphones in a store to scan the barcodes of products to find better deals on Amazon or at a nearby competitor’s location. It is clear that retailers must go on the offensive against showrooming and find new ways to market to consumers and harness the power of mobile phones.

With the introduction of the iPhone and the rapid evolution of smartphones and tablets, users could access the web wherever they were. They also became consistently accessible, with most mobile device owners becoming so attached to the technology that they never had it far from them and they never turned it off.  By far the biggest single piece of new information that is available from consumers’ mobile devices is the accurate location of the device, powered by the onboard GPS that has become a hallmark of all modern smartphones.