Category Archives: Technology

Google launches Google Wallet; what are its growth prospects?

Google and its partners (Sprint, MasterCard, Citi and First Data) officially launched the Google Wallet mobile payments app yesterday.

At the same time, Google licensed Visa’s PayWave contactless payment technology.  And both American Express and Discover signed on as Google partners.  With these companies now on board, Google is starting to build a strong partner ecosystem.  In so doing, Google Wallet competing with other emerging mobile payment systems (such as Visa’s own Digital Wallet as well as the Isis consortium), in getting the strong array of partners in place.

Building a partner ecosystem will certainly help to strengthen the various mobile payment offerings.  However, the emerging mobile payments sector will need to overcome a range of key hurdles in the coming years.  Two of the most significant hurdles are:

  • Merchant acceptance: only a very small percentage of merchant payment terminals can currently process mobile paymment transactions.  Mobile payment providers will need to focus initially on spend categories and merchants that are most amenable to mobile payments, and over time expand to other merchant categories.
  • Consumer adoption: Cash and cards are established and relatively convenient forms of payment, and will be very difficult to dislodge.  Mobile payment providers will need to build awareness of mobile payments as a spending category, and communicate mobile payments’ key advantages over establish payment methods (e.g., speed, convenience, as well as the ability to receive special offers at the point of sale).  In addition to marketing the categories, individual mobile payment providers will also have to differentiate their own offering from direct competitors.

With these hurdles in mind, it is notable that American Banker this week quoted a MasterCard executive as referring to Google Wallet as a “five-to-ten year effort, not a one-year effort.”

QR Codes: Don’t Hesitate, But Do Think

No one who sends out any significant quantity of response-driven direct mail should neglect to test the use of QR codes. Period. Given the continuing growth of the use of smartphones, it’s a strategically sound opportunity to improve response rates by facilitating the connection between a mailed piece and an electronic response. Recent data from comScore MobiLens highlights the opportunity: 14 million mobile users in the US scanned a QR code on their mobile device in June 2011 alone.

That being said, the devil, as always, is in the details. Just sticking a square filled with dots on a DM piece is a waste of effort if you don’t think through what the objective of including the QR code should be and your expectations for the entire user experience that will be activated through the code. For example:

  • Are there certain segments of your audience that are more likely to respond to QR codes and how and when are they likely to scan the codes? To answer this, you’ll need to assess what percentage of these segments own smart phones. Then you’ll need to determine the likely scenarios in which they might use those phones in response to the presentation of a QR code?
  • If the code will be used as mechanism for increasing awareness of a product or service, are you sending the QR code user to a mobile friendly website? Is the information easily and comfortably accessible on a mobile device (e.g., web pages as opposed to pdfs, which are still often hard to view on mobile phones)?
  • Will you be using the code for lead generation? If so, is your lead capture form built to be completed on a mobile device?

Working through these kinds of questions should not dissuade you from using QR codes, and it’s important to remember that the process won’t guarantee that a QR code will provide significant lift to your DM efforts. But by investing the time in planning, you will ensure that your test of integrating the QR codes will be an accurate read of their current potential impact for your audience.

Tablet Computers’ Killer App?

Anyone who works in sales enablement needs to take notice of how rapidly tablet computers are sweeping across the corporate landscape. According to recently published research from Model Metrics, 68% of companies plan to have tablets deployed in the field by 2012. Over 40% have deployed or plan on deploying them by the end of 2011. And almost 50% of those deployments, according to the study, involve sales force automation applications.

As we have blogged previously, the rapid and widespread adoption of tablets represents a huge opportunity for organizations that are willing to make an investment in sales enablement. Even further, deploying tablets to the field in the absence of high-quality sales tools designed for the tablet platform is a waste of the technology investment. In many ways, sales tools—such as automated proposal builders, presentation templates, and product comparisons—should be a “killer app” for the tablet in B2B selling because they represent a perfect alignment of technology benefits with user requirements. For sales tools to be effective, they must be easy to use, intuitively interactive, and fast: all of these characteristics are part of the raison d’etre of the tablet device. Moreover, though, tablets enable sales tools to go a step beyond the status quo because, if done well, they can facilitate customer participation. Compared to handing a prospect a feature-based product comparison sheet, how much more effective would it be to hand prospects a tablet loaded with a diagnostic app that walks them through a series of questions about features, benefits, and value that highlight key points of differentiation for your product versus the competitions’?

Perhaps the most important component of the tablet opportunity in the sales force is that tablets can provide significant support to the majority of sales people in the vast middle of the bell curve—not the stars but those who have some skills and the best of intentions. If the greater structure, consistency, and interactivity enabled by the tablets can raise the average performance of this group just a few percentage points, it can represent millions of dollars in revenue gains.