Retail has to look beyond coupons

Yes, we have heard it before: the mobile device is a personal portable billboard! But it is more than that. It’s a dialogue tool. It is not only the bearer of a digital coupon. It would be a shame to reduce the mobile to a direct response medil channel only. The retail industry has a great opportunity here. A  360 view is needed. If you weave several contact points and reasons for interaction with your customers into a mobile concept, there are opportunites abundant.

So here we go – a free concept for food retailer – a customer loyalty card in the mobile. Remeber, you read it here first.

Customer benefits are immediate and you will be a hero. No more card to remember and carry in the wallet. The phone is there already. The phone number is the unique identifier. As a member you get real value from day one: a starter package including access to a mobile service and app were adequate information, recipes and food tips live together with several dialogue channels with the store – local and centrally. The beauty is that you most likely produce much of this content anyway in a physical magazine and flyers.

Into this you feed in your featured items and discounts. See Whole Foods’ and Jamie Oliver’s iPhone apps for inspiration. Allow searches on produce so you can go shopping and in the store look up suggestions for what you cook based on those chicken filets you have at home in the freezer. Build in shopping list with various grouping options like, by aisle, by recipe etc. – Put barcodes on your shelves for customers with camera phones. They can then look up deep product info by scanning barcode with their own camera. If you are a chain have directions services using location data. If you run a bank like many food retailers in Scandinavia do allow banking and payment via mobile

Finally, yes of course coupons and direct mail type offers as well. They are after all transaction drivers. But now you can combine opt-in and develop this to suggestions based on what purchases the customers have made before.

With this interactive portable store card you have an entire platform for communication, information, sales but also feedback from your customers. A majority of your customers are happy to give you advice on everything from the store layout, your selection of baby food to the price of milk. Allow the creation of consumer groups and forums. Why not experiment with dynamic pricing to optimise your inventory or to drive stora traffic? Send out time sensitive price offers to your moble loyalty club members.

“Nice, who pays for this then?”, is your thought now. Your customer by shopping more and telling there friends about your great service and your suppliers. The latter already pay you for shelf space. The mobile is the digital shelf. The recipe and shopping list service and app is not expensive to build. You build it once and distribution cost is near to zero. Data fees is on the customer.

The main challenge to all this is the minds and set ways the marketing director and other decision makers in a project like this are stuck in. I am willing to run a set of workshops pro-bono with a top management team in any retail company just to get the ball rolling. Any takers or tips on people who should take this opportunity? Let me know.

That is if you made it all the way to the end of this post and is not already working on your mobile consumer club concept. If you want to make a difference you should be.