Google announced today that they’re extending their reach into the location-based marketing business, with the launch of a couponing product. Local businesses can offer coupons against their products and services via Google Maps and users simply print them and then then redeem them as usual.
My first reaction to this is - where’s the mobile element? Google Maps already offer the facility to send driving directions to your phone, so why not get the coupons sent there too? You could simply show the phone at the point of sale and that’s it.
Many of the problems associated with redemption of phone-based coupons aren’t applicable in this instance. If the target market is expected to be owner-run businesses, staff education about the redemption process ceases to become an issue - whereas for someone like Walmart to introduce mobile coupons, the physical redemption process becomes a huge hurdle to overcome. In any event, the option to make the coupon mobile could be given to the merchant on sign up, so they can decide if its something they can cope with.
In addition, malredemption of coupons isn’t an issue here, as all these coupons are all self-liquidating offers, so the more redeemed, the better. This must be the case, as by partnering with Google Maps in the first place, the merchant has made an unlimited number of coupons available, in theory.
Ultimately, the mobile element could encompass a bar code redemption process, which has to be a Holy Grail of mobile marketing. However, I’m not convinced that the technology is there yet to scan bar codes on mobile phone screens. For this to work in the wild, it must be applicable to all phones (no exceptions). And users must be able to find them instantly - which is a far bigger problem than it might appear. If old Mrs Smith takes 10 minutes to find her phone, switch it on and scroll through menus before finding her 5 cent coupon, it’ll cause a lot of tutting in the queue in Sainsbury’s on a busy Saturday morning. Not to mention fisticuffs in the Board Room as the Marketing Director and Ops Director go head-to-head.
It’ll be very interesting to see how this location-based experiment turns out though, as Google must be one of the few players who might just have the clout to make this work. Scaling this experiment is not a trivial task, as millions of businesses need to join the programme to be meaningful.
However, if they do make it happen and you work for Yellow Pages, or a similar company, you should be mildly panicking this morning and figuring out how you can fight back, as the Google user and advertiser proposition is now very strong.
Google does very well by making most of its revenue from SMEs. I imagine that mobile coupons will be adopted first by industry leaders that can afford the R&D investment.
Also, in my experience, the bigger advertisers see mobile as a ‘direct response’ tool. They are interested in delivering coupons directly from tv commercials (see our partnership with ITV) or to opted in databases (see our Sainsbury’s mobile club case study).
Google would never let Coke, McDonalds or Heinz branding bleed onto their clean, white pages. Yahoo! and Microsoft would though. (I admit that Maps is a bit different though)
Would you mind me clearing up one point that you made in your article? You said that that mobiles are difficult to scan reliably and that it takes a long time for customers to find their barcodes.
The program that we run in Sainsbury’s has shown reliable scan rates. With the right combination of training (30 mins per cashier) and fairly standard barcode readers (starting at £60 each) we get scan rates of nearly 100%.
Also, because our members only need one barcode scanned regardless of how many deals they are claiming, our system is much, much faster than redeeming paper coupons. We are only measuring differences in convenience stores at the moment, time savings will be even better in mainstream supermarkets.
All the best,
marc
Mobile coupons are coming…because we’re delivering them. Google provides a very simple solution for putting coupons on Google’s maps. ZiXXo provides a simple, yet powerful, solution for syndicating coupons everywhere on the Internet. In fact, ZiXXo provides an API for adding coupons to things like yellow pages listings, maps, local search results, everything. It is nice to have a giant like Google validate the market for online coupons.
Marc - 30 minutes training per cashier sounds imminently reasonable, until you start thinking about scaling this. Sainsbury’s in the UK, for example, has about 750 stores. Each would have, at a wild guess, around 100 cashiers, taking into account shifts, part timers and temps. That’s 37,500 person hours of training.
Now, you wouldn’t have to do this one-on-one obviously. But if you were to do it in 4 shifts per store, which seems a reasonable guess, that’s 1,500 hours of training. Let’s say you had one person doing one store a day, to do this in a 10 day period, you need a team of 150 trainers. No trivial task, and that’s just one store.
Also, in my experience, “nearly 100%” doesn’t hack it with bar code redemption. I’ve known supermarkets to send back whole lines of products which have problems with bar code reading. An Ops Director’s whole life is dedicated to processing customers quickly and anything that compromises this will be an issue.
That doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen and companies like yours are poised to cash in when the tech is ready and more importantly, when stores are ready.
Russell
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One more pt regarding that bar code reader. Super stores already have sp. cards for discounts such as Albertson card or safeway card which gives me additional discounts on particular items and scanned only once. Feature like this will incorporate that card into phone that’s it. Once that starts to happen then we can say that bar codes are successful in stores and then send bar coded coupons on mobile phones. Until that day, It will be very hard.
Mike,
I am trying to put what zixxo is doing in one sentence. Coupons Inc for local merchants. Let me know if this correct.
Google programs typically are a little rough around the edges at first, but once they have 6 months or so of additional development, they are usually pretty good. A good example of this is Sitemaps.
I was just looking at some primary research by a Japanese company called Infoplant on coupons. Mobile coupons are now apparently the third source of coupons amongst Japanese consumers, below leaflets and free newspapers but above retailers, magazines and internet. In Japan, mobile coupons are redeemed via 2d barcodes, NFC IC chips, infrared or, more simply, through promotional codes.