Starbucks is using mobile marketing - Are you onboard yet?
Like that song you hear playing at Starbucks, but just cannot wait until you get to a computer to download the song?
Starting tomorrow at certain Starbucks stores, a person with an iPhone or iTunes software loaded onto a laptop can download the songs they hear over the speakers directly onto those devices. The price will be 99 cents a song, a small price, Starbucks says, to satisfy an immediate urge.
“For the customer it’s an instant gratification,” said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment. “You’ll hear the song, be able to identify what it is and download to the device.”
And it’s just the tip of the iced latte. Businesses are using new technologies to enhance the impulse buy so consumers can purchase their temptations whenever they want, wherever they are, before the urge passes.
Amazon.com pioneered one-click shopping to speed purchases, whether made at home or on an employer’s time. But the development of more capable gadgets, coupled with mobile payment mechanisms, is allowing people to buy not just media, like music, videos and ring tones, but also hard goods, on the go.
This evolution follows the popularity of debit, gift and refill cards, which allow buyers to fill accounts and make cashless payments. Payments made with those cards exceed the payments made by cash and check, according to the Nilson Report, a credit industry newsletter, which used Commerce Department data.
Credit card companies in particular are experimenting with ways to turn the phone into a conduit for card purchases and to offer incentives, like coupons, for mobile purchases. Visa, for instance, is developing technology that will allow people to wave their cellphones in front of a reader to pay for items under $25 without a signature. (Swiping the card through a reader, an innovation several years old, is apparently too much of an impediment.)
The idea is no waiting, cashier or other buying barrier — aside from the charges that show up on a credit card or cellphone bill. And there, along with challenges revolving around security and business models, lies a chief rub.
The mobile-payment technology can create a desensitizing and seductive purchase experience, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University.
“The more people think about a purchase decision, the more likely uncertainty creeps in,” he said. “One frame of mind is you’re helping create in consumers’ mind a source of pleasure, and enabling them to fulfill that pleasure,” Mr. Katz said of the mobile impulse temptation. Another is that “they’re preying on our materialistic souls.”
For now, the new Starbucks service’s preying capabilities will be limited. The concept is being introduced in around 600 cafes in New York and Seattle only, though Starbucks, based in Seattle, and Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., plan to offer the service in other major cities late this year and in 2008.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01impulse.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1191258593-SprF1hO8wuK6tIL/PA/fBA October 1, 2007.
Starting tomorrow at certain Starbucks stores, a person with an iPhone or iTunes software loaded onto a laptop can download the songs they hear over the speakers directly onto those devices. The price will be 99 cents a song, a small price, Starbucks says, to satisfy an immediate urge.
“For the customer it’s an instant gratification,” said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment. “You’ll hear the song, be able to identify what it is and download to the device.”
And it’s just the tip of the iced latte. Businesses are using new technologies to enhance the impulse buy so consumers can purchase their temptations whenever they want, wherever they are, before the urge passes.
Amazon.com pioneered one-click shopping to speed purchases, whether made at home or on an employer’s time. But the development of more capable gadgets, coupled with mobile payment mechanisms, is allowing people to buy not just media, like music, videos and ring tones, but also hard goods, on the go.
This evolution follows the popularity of debit, gift and refill cards, which allow buyers to fill accounts and make cashless payments. Payments made with those cards exceed the payments made by cash and check, according to the Nilson Report, a credit industry newsletter, which used Commerce Department data.
Credit card companies in particular are experimenting with ways to turn the phone into a conduit for card purchases and to offer incentives, like coupons, for mobile purchases. Visa, for instance, is developing technology that will allow people to wave their cellphones in front of a reader to pay for items under $25 without a signature. (Swiping the card through a reader, an innovation several years old, is apparently too much of an impediment.)
The idea is no waiting, cashier or other buying barrier — aside from the charges that show up on a credit card or cellphone bill. And there, along with challenges revolving around security and business models, lies a chief rub.
The mobile-payment technology can create a desensitizing and seductive purchase experience, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University.
“The more people think about a purchase decision, the more likely uncertainty creeps in,” he said. “One frame of mind is you’re helping create in consumers’ mind a source of pleasure, and enabling them to fulfill that pleasure,” Mr. Katz said of the mobile impulse temptation. Another is that “they’re preying on our materialistic souls.”
For now, the new Starbucks service’s preying capabilities will be limited. The concept is being introduced in around 600 cafes in New York and Seattle only, though Starbucks, based in Seattle, and Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., plan to offer the service in other major cities late this year and in 2008.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01impulse.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1191258593-SprF1hO8wuK6tIL/PA/fBA October 1, 2007.
