Unilever to Measure Mobile Coupon Use and Effectiveness
How many people in Hillsborough, NJ, will go on the web, send coupons to their mobile phone, then redeem those coupons at a local ShopRite grocery store by using their mobile phone? That’s what packaged goods giant Unilever wants to find out.
In one of the first large-scale tests of its kind, Unilever wants to measure the effectiveness of marrying online coupons to mobile phone redemption. “This has been a Holy Grail thing that people have been trying to figure out,” said Marc Shaw, director of integrated marketing at Unilever, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. If the test proves successful, Unilever stands to learn a valuable lessons, as online coupon redemption rates are typically in the mid-teens, compared to print coupon redemption rates, which typically don’t break one percent. By letting consumers transmit the coupons to their mobile phones, instead of forcing them to print the coupons out, Unilever hopes to give customers an easy, hassle-free way to access the coupons, as these days, mobile phones are fairly ubiquitous. “The cell phone is the thing that when you leave behind at home, you go back and get it. It’s the organizer of our lives,” said Unilever’s Shaw, again as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
In order to participate in the test, shoppers need to go to Samplesaint.com, select the coupons they want, transmit them from the website to their mobile phone. Come check-out time at the grocery store, the shopper simply hands the cashier his or her mobile phone. The cashier scans the coupon’s bar code on the phone screen . . . the shopper saves money, and the coupon is then deleted automatically from his or her mobile phone—thereby reducing the possibility of coupon fraud.
Sounds simple, but the possibility for technical glitches are legion, and that’s why, according to the Journal, other large companies have kept from trying this particular digital coupon redemption format. What could go wrong, Mr. Murphy? A number of things, including incompatible electronic devices, software bugs, dropped calls mid-redemption, and the unavoidable notion that some grocery store scanners won’t be able to penetrate the cell phone’s screen to read the coupon’s bar code.
Still, the potential for reward is alluring enough for some companies to try to make the paradigm work, especially those companies that sell things found in your garden variety supermarket. For not only do digital coupons have higher redemption rates, approximately 87% of those consumers who use coupons of any kind in the first place do so at a grocery store.
However, Unilever’s test might come down to a case of the right paradigm crippled by the wrong technology. The technology that would really serve this paradigm well is near field technology, which would eliminate the need for a physical scan from a bar code reader at check-out time. With near field technology, a shopper could transfer coupon information from his or her mobile phone at check out time simply by holding his or her phone up to an electronic reading device. No mess, no fuss—two good things for consumers.
Though near field technology is already catching on in Asia, it hasn’t quite reached North America outside of gas station quick payment passes. So though Unilever’s test might just prove successful, it would have gone gangbusters if only the technology existed in the United States to make the paradigm truly work.
By Robert Pothier
