Brief:

• 3M today introduced the Post-it App for Android to help mobile users capture, organize and digitally share ideas written on the line of sticky notes. The app can capture as many 200 Post-it Notes at a time, and lets users edit them and add digital notes in a variety of colors, handwriting styles and text, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• The notes are kept separate from each other and are individually moveable, letting users organize them into boards or grids on the app. The notes are saved as shareable records that users can export to PDFs, productivity programs like PowerPoint and Excel or services like Dropbox.
• "The Post-it App bridges the gap between the analog and digital world, cutting out the countless hours spent transcribing notes after a brainstorm," 3M said in the announcement.

Insight:

Post-it Notes were a revolutionary time-saving product when they were introduced in the 1970s, and experienced a resurgence in the past decade as 3M started marketing them as a tool for innovation and collaboration. The new Post-it App for Android aims to bring the sticky notes into mobile era as more people use their smartphones to stay organized or to collaborate with others, bridging the gap between offline and digital experiences.

3M needs to keep apace with productivity apps like Evernote, which in 2014 added a sticky note scanning feature, while making its Post-it brand more central to its programs' user experience (UX). The manufacturing giant faces a crowded field for productivity apps, a category that's dominated by tech stalwarts such as Google and Microsoft. Google's Gmail was the most downloaded productivity app in the U.S. last year with more than 22 million new installs, per data compiled by Sensor Tower.

The Post-it Notes app comes as the brand prepares for the busy back-to-school season. This month, it launched a global campaign, "Think Loud," for students as they shop for school supplies, Campaign reported. 3M also has sought to expand the market for Post-its beyond the office environment. Last year, the company introduced Post-it Extreme Notes to handle tougher conditions such as construction sites. An internal study found that 82% of U.S. workers who work mainly in construction, manufacturing and culinary jobs had trouble communicating at work. The product aimed to help them replace other methods of writing notes to each other, Fast Company reported, signaling a potential use case for the new app.