Marketing Convergence, Stupid!

The only positive thing from this recession is all the discount offers we keep receiving in our email inbox: 20% discount on this; one buy/one free item; new happy hour formula; etc. What is not good is when customer service does not match the offer. And especially for silly reasons, i.e. when the company forgets we are in a digital age.

So I got one of these offers and I thought: “Fantastic, let’s go there!” (without even thinking that in normal time, they should be able to do this kind of things as well). So I arrived at the restaurant and explained to the waiter that I had this discount offer. Here is the dialogue:

“- I am sorry Sir, but you need to print it out.

- No worries. Here is my iPhone, I can show you the voucher and give you the code. Should be all right.

- I am sorry Sir, but it needs to be printed

- OK, but as each voucher has a unique bar code, if I give you the code, you can identify it and technically speaking it works.”

Then the manager came and said:

“-  Sir, It has to be printed, we need a proof we got your voucher. The only thing we can do now is to take your phone.”

After that the discussion ended, but with lots of bitterness on my side and one adjective on mind: silly. As so many people have smart phone and the number will keep increasing, how the people behind the emailing campaign could have not thought about it? I am increasingly the witness of this kind of situation when people use their smart phone to show they got the invite, registered for the event or performed any other activity. And most of the time, if you are facing someone not flexible, the answer you would get is no.

The only positive thing is that it will not last, it cannot. Companies have to move on and understand the full potential of mobiles and let people use them in a free way. Europe and Northern America are lagging behind Japan in terms of mobile phone capabilities: QR code is the norm for any product and mobile payment is a reality all over the country. The introduction of augmented reality on the iPhone 3GS is the beginning of a revolution on how people move around a place, which has some point will influence their shopping decision. And as people are increasingly using nano laptop (that is what the iPhone and Blackberry are, let us be honest), brands should take this device into account.

But more than that, it is the convergence between all our devices: smart phone, desktop, web browser (and what will come in the next few years). The important point is to be able to synchronize all the activities done all around the place and make users be able to resume their activities at any time. I hope next time I receive one of these emails, someone somewhere would have figured that out.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:11 am and is filed under Intelligence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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