A M commerce experience Retail could create NOW!

During my morning reading, I came across another article about "mobile marketing", this one in AdAge. As with many such articles, the technology and adoption rates for that technology are a number of years in the future, and the consumer behavior which supports the value proposition hasn't actually developed yet. Interesting, but not applicable today. Particularly for retailers, specifically multichannel retailers.

Surprisingly, I have come across a type of M Commerce which exists today, relies on hardware already well established in the market, and leverages consumer behavior which already exists. What if we were to look at the "m" in mcommerce and say that it stands for a mobile bridge between the offline and online world? What is it? Using 2D or QR codes to link online content to off-line shopping behavior. What does that look like?

It looks like a consumer standing in front of a washing machine and being able to access the consumer reviews (text and/or video) which already exists online for that item. It looks like a consumer standing in front a television set and being able to access the Flat Panel TV selection tool the company has for it's ecommerce site, or the video buying guide also accessible online. Or receiving coupons and marketing information driven by the consumer's loyalty card history...all of which are stored online. These aren't things that require innovations in technology or changes in consumer behavior.

Consumer behavior: right now, one of the most common actions for consumers online is to research products before making purchases. Using net-linked devices to do that research isn't limited to laptops and desktops. Recent studies show that smartphone users do exactly the same thing with theirs. They look for information prior to making a purchase. One of the most commonly accessed bits of information is customer reviews. Videos are being consumed on smartphones at staggering rates. So none of the behaviors noted above requires that the consumer do something new.

The hardware which makes this possible are smartphones.....which have a pretty solid user base already and are projected to grow at over 8X the growth rate of the overall mobile phone handset market. The software are 2D or QR codes. See 2DCodeMe.com for both an overview and free generator for these codes. Essentially, all the consumer needs is a smartphone and a 2D code reader app.....which are free and take about a minute to download. Once on the smartphone, the apps use the camera function as an advanced scanner which recognizes the data stored in the code and tells the smartphone what to do. Like open a url linked to a video providing information about choosing flat planel televisions.

This post was just to say "hey....there's a form of M commerce you could be doing NOW".... the next one will tell you how easy it is to actually do it.