It’s funny how the world never turns out how it's expected to. The Jetsons vision of the future never happened. I haven’t yet had a chip implanted in my skull. And Sean Cummins has swapped the Golden Lions for Hawthorn Football Club ads (for now).
Second Life turned out to be a pile of crap. Bluetooth, though still a feature of mobile phones, turned to nothing for most of us. Broadband appears to be king and that linked with geolocation is the most exciting thing in marketing, shifting it from the mainstream to the local level.
I mentioned all this on my post on Foursquare, which itself only really scratches the surface of the potential of the double whammy of mobile phone payment systems, customer information and geolocation.
Here’s a scenario. You are at Woolworths Liquor buying a bottle of wine, let’s say Australia’s most popular and best known brand, the Marlborough Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand.
You are about to pay with your mobile phone that connects to an online database, which discovers while it costs $19.99 here, you could pop around the corner to Dan Murphy’s (also owned by Woolworths) and buy it for $13.99 (still overpriced in my opinion).
Already some of this stuff is around. The smart phone app Redlaser in the US will scan a barcode and search the price of the goods – almost anything – around you (although is almost useless in Australia currently).
It shifts the pricing power from retailers to the customer.
But there’s more. Soon small retailers will be able to sidestep their banks in accepting card payments and understand their customers’ loyalty.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in December 2009 revealed the website for his product Square, a card scanner that plugs into the audio socket of a phone. It makes card acceptance cheaper as it doesn’t need anything supplied by a bank. It has plenty of rocking features but most importantly it lets the merchant know return customers. That means the retailer can provide a loyalty reward for the customer.
Meanwhile, another phone application is changing the world of cause marketing. Causeworld is an application created by US-based start-up Shopkick, a smart phone application, which allows donations to be made to charity selected by the user by checking into various retail locations (in a similar manner to Four Square). Each check-in earns karma points, which translate into donations. Early adopters supporting these products are some of the biggest brands in the game, Procter & Gamble, Kraft foods and Citi, which have donated several hundred thousands of dollars to give to causes.
I know I’ve been banging on a lot about social media and geolocation recently. But if you want to see the future outside of the 30 second TVC or the full page ad or Max Markson, it’s local and promotional. And it makes the customer king.