Harvester Restaurants’ couponing success

I missed this case study first time around, but since I seem to be thinking a lot about mobile and retail at the moment, I thought it worth sharing.

Harvester is a chain of family-friendly restaurants with 200 outlets across the UK. They’re open seven days a week and offer grills, sauces and sides, as well as a brunch menu and vegetarian options at very competitive prices. I haven’t been to Harvester restaurant in almost 30 years, so I can’t comment on the quality of the food but I have friends who enjoy it.

To attract new customers and to build repeat business, they rely on regular offers and you’ll see their website shows the latest offers and the latest menus. When the Apple Passbook arrived on the scene, mobile advertising firm, Millennial Media, teamed up with mobile couponing firm, Eagle Eye, to create a campaign to drive customers to store.

According to Gavin Stirrat, MD EMEA for Millennial Media, they served display adverts to iPhone 5 users and those who had upgraded to iOS 6, with a skew towards families. When you clicked the banner, you reached a landing page communicating the offer - £5 off when you spend £30 or more -  and the call-to-action to add this to your Passbook. Eagle Eye then pushed the individually coded coupon to their smartphone. No additional customer details were required making the process as seamless as possible.

Once the voucher was loaded into Passbook, you could redeem the voucher in the restaurant via the restaurant’s existing Chip & Pin terminal. In this way, it was possible to measure redemption rates and ROI. The campaign ran for two weeks and in that time, 16,000 vouchers were issued and around 700 were redeemed offering a 4.4% redemption rate. As the offer was for a minimum spend of £30, it drove at least £21,000 in revenue. And remember, this was just marketed to a subset of iOS customers who had iPhone 5 or iOS 6 so they had the improved Passbook functionality.

It seems that even iPhone 5 customers like a bargain…

More on Millennial Media’s site here and here. Press release on Eagle Eye’s site here.

Further reading on how digital can drive customer engagement, footfall and loyalty in the High Street from Eagle Eye’s Andy Smith in British Retail Consortium’s Winter 2012 publication. (It’s one of those magazine reader thingies so it won’t work on a tiny mobile screen).

Is mobile couponing finally hitting the mainstream?

It seems like a lifetime ago since I had my first exposure to mobile couponing back in 2000 at ZagMe. Yes, it’s some twelve years ago since I helped invent location based sms couponing with fellow mobilist, Russell Buckley. I’ve seen many coupon projects come and go and I’ve seen many location based services come and go, but finally, we appear to be at the point where this thing is hitting the mainstream. And yet again, we have Apple to thank for it.

May of you will know that I do not worship at the altar of Apple but there’s no denying that they have changed our mobile world forever. And may well be changing the world of mobile couponing forever too with the introduction of Passbook. This is an app that helps you keep track of your mobile coupons, tickets and gift cards. With the added bonus of being location-aware (optional), it can nudge you when you’re near an outlet where you can use said coupons if that company’s app has that feature included. I don’t have a working iPhone so I haven’t tested this myself, but from the description here, it still sounds a bit clunky. But I have no doubt that the clunks will be evened out pretty quickly as there’s more take-up and developers work out how to get the best from the service.

This is first to market in the US, but the UK is catching up. We’re not as coupon obsessed in the UK as the US (where they have a TV show dedicated to the topic), but we do still like a bargain – Groupon and its ilk have been a success here and SalesGossip is also gaining traction. Meanwhile, Harvester has teamed up with Eagle Eye and Millennial Media to be the first UK company to use Passbook for their couponing.

Helen Worrall, Marketing Manager, Harvester said: “We are excited to be amongst the first in line to use this new way to distribute mobile vouchers to Apple Passbook users, offering our customers a better and more convenient experience. Not only does it provide us with a new way of engaging the iOS 6 iPhone users, but the benefit having one central point to digitally distribute and redeem vouchers in real-time means we have more control and visibility over our marketing campaign performance.”

I’m interested to see how this one plays out (you can try out the campaign for yourself if you go to http://tinyurl.com/harvesterPB from your iPhone) and I will be watching to see how the campaign fares as well as keeping an eye out as to how other retailers take on the challenge of digital couponing beyond the iPhone.

Dare I say it? Is this the year of mobile couponing?

Internet Week EU–Mobile Best Practice Panel

It was a busy week last week – it was Internet Week in London and there were a ton of mobile events as part of that. I moderated two sessions, participated in a round table, went to a dinner and attended two mobile conferences. Even by my standards, that’s quite a lot. There were some recurring themes though…

• Mobile is still being placed in a silo and not prioritised despite proven results. I heard tell of a bank wanting a mobile presence but not willing to put any budget behind it. Another tale of a large retailer whose mobile commerce offering is highly successful but has been ignored in all the above the line marketing for their Christmas push.
• Ad agencies are one of the barriers – inability to make margin or add value in a mobile proposition; lack of technical knowledge or expertise; blinded by the iPhone; unwillingness to change their way of working to incorporate mobile thinking to be at the heart of the strategy rather than an add-on
• Mobile marketing budgets are still relatively small as compared with above the line or even social media budgets (despite ~50% of social media being consumed on a mobile device)
• Clients lacking technical knowledge and lacking in consumer insight means that mobile initiatives are tactical rather than strategic.
• Arguably, mobile commerce is core business to many organisations now (in the same way as having a bricks and mortar store or an ecommerce offering), but is not treated as thus
• We’re still talking about statistics to prove that customers have gone mobile. Surely we know this already and we should be moving on to talking about what we do, how we do it and what we learned in the process?
• There is an obsession with direct ROI in mobile initiatives and a fast one – a few months, maybe a year. Yet in publishing, a new print magazine would not be expected to break even for three years. The mobile experience is more complex than just looking at the number of hits or click throughs and we should be applying research methods from other marketing and commerce disciplines rather than transplanting online advertising models.
• Accessibility is barely on the radar at all. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to alienate a large proportion of your customers because they don’t have your preferred device, so what chance do people with impairments or disabilities have when it comes to the big guys making their mobile sites and services more accessible?! Oh, and there are at least 54m disabled people in the US and over 6m of them here in the UK.

Much of this, and more, was discussed in my Internet Week panel session last Thursday at The Hospital. My fellow panellists were James Pimentel-Pinto from full-service mobile agency, AgencyMobile, Shawn Thomson from Largetail, consultant Andrea Bauer and Andy Smith, formerly of Admob (Google) and now with mobile couponing specialist Eagle Eye. There were also some interesting questions and comments from the audience. So if you have 40 minutes or so to spare, you may want to take a look or have a listen. Comments and questions welcome.

Give me just a little more time

And my love will surely grow.. Yes, that’s the lyric to a song from the 70s by The Chairmen of the Board. But it’s how I feel about so many location-based, time-based, relevant-for-me advertising.

Like a lot of people, I’ve signed up to my localised Groupon, Living Social and other services and it feels like I’m being bombarded by time-based deals. I’ve also recently signed up to Moshogo, which tells me about events going on my local area. A useful service in theory. But they’re all making the same fundamental mistake. They’re not giving me enough time.

With Moshogo, I receive a daily mobile-optimised email of what’s on today in my local area. And it’s really comprehensive and well put together. But by the time I read the email – even if it’s first thing in the morning, it’s simply too late. I don’t have time to get myself organised and friends organised to go and do something that starts in an hour’s time – no matter how amazing and how relevant it is for me. I probably need a selection of what’s on highlights twice a week and then I click through to the site for more. Or maybe I need to have the choice to hone the selection even further so it’s truly personalised.

Like a lot of folks, I do love a bargain. So in theory, Groupon style deals should work for me. But it doesn’t. With Groupon and its clones, it’s the same. I’m worn out with being shouted at as to what to buy right now. I’m just not that impulsive when it comes to shopping and making decisions about what to buy and what not to buy. I don’t think I ever was. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

Back in the mists of mobile time at the start of the century, I worked at a start-up called ZagMe where we sent text message coupons to shoppers at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls (the two largest in Europe at the time). These text messages were offer-based and sent while shoppers were actually out shopping. (Yes, I know. We were at least 10 years ahead of our time. We learned that one the hard way). We experimented a lot with timing of offers. And we learned two key things.

Firstly, the offers we sent as people arrived at the shopping mall were the ones most likely to be redeemed.

Secondly, time-based offers had to give the shoppers enough time to redeem the coupon without them having to charge across the shopping centre to meet the deadline of the offer. So offers that were time-limited to an hour were a no-no, but offers that could be redeemed any time that day were more successful.

So Groupon, Living Social, and those of their ilk. Please, give me just a little more time.

What if Tesco decided to really take on mobile?

It has struck me that the mobile industry, despite being enormous, has a lot to learn still and some growing up to do when it comes to diversifying their business, increasing revenues and creating a sustainable ecosystem.

Mobile technology is central to our world these days and is a remote control for life. It’s our access to our friends and family. It’s the route to information at the click of a button. It’s how we find our way around the city streets. It’s how we communicate and it’s how we consume media of all kinds – interactive or not.

My background is retail (although not grocery, which I know has some unique characteristics) so I’m slightly biased here, but I think we, in the mobile world, have a lot to learn about from other sectors like retail and FMCG when it comes to product development, wholesaling goods, customer service, merchandising and display, marketing and lots more besides. It is said that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers yet we don’t seem to have applied that thinking enough in the world of mobile.

Photo credit: Tom Arthur

Think about a supermarket - And let’s face it, most App stores are essentially supermarkets for apps. Supermarkets stock 1000s of lines – but they are all carefully selected and chosen based on customer insight and buying trends, the products are placed carefully, if not scientifically, on shelves to maximise their potential for sales. Certain products are promoted in a variety of ways – sometimes by the supermarket, but more often than not by the producer, or even if the supermarket does the marketing, it’s paid for by the producer. Next time you go to the supermarket have a look at how things are promoted - 3 for 2 offers, buy tortilla chips and get a certain brand of salsa dip free, recipe cards encouraging you to try certain ingredients, free samples, on-pack promotions – there’s a lot going on and this list isn’t exhaustive. Products and brands are competing for physical space, customer mindshare and ultimately for sales.

Now let’s look at your typical app store. It’s all very democratic and level playing field, sort of. Pretty much anyone can upload their app (subject to rules of decency, and some limited technical, legal or commercial constraints). There’s no particular product selection process to make sure the product is right for the store or more specifically the customer base of that store beyond having the right device (iphone, Android, Series 60 Nokia etc). Prime shelf space are the app charts in specific categories and it’s very limited. And it’s hard to find stuff – mainly because there’s too much there in the first place. (Can you imagine what your local Tesco would look like if everyone who’d ever had a product idea put it up for sale in the store? How much shelf space would you need and how, as a shopper, would you find anything?). There are limited promotions. I haven’t seen any 3 for 2 offers, or on(/in)-app promotions beyond an annoying advert which keeps flashing at you when you’re trying to play a game and covers up a key touchpoint in it (top tip, turn the wifi off and the ad-funded app is suddenly not ad-funded any more).

Photo credit: Peekaboo

Now let’s look at Tesco in more detail (I choose Tesco because it’s our UK No1 supermarket with global reach, takes £1 in every £3 spent in the UK on groceries and it’s making £6,000 profit a minute, not turnover – profit, and that’s up 12.5% on last year. It’s big.)

Tesco has a lot going for it which means it can enter other markets and do very well in them – banking (including offering mortgages by the end of 2010), music (even doing exclusive distribution deals with artists like Faithless), book retailing, being a media owner in its own right…

1. Physical location – there are Tesco shops up and down the country of all shapes and sizes, serving all markets. It is mass market.

2. It has the biggest loyalty card in the UK – The Tesco Clubcard. The company who numbercrunch the clubcard and sales data provide amazing analytics for the supermarket to inform the product buying process – which products do or don’t get picked , which get marketed, data to support marketing initiatives and valuable market research data for third parties.

3. It has an online commerce operation for groceries, fashion and household and the related expertise in e-commerce, logistics, distribution, search engine optimisation, online marketing, email marketing and more.

4. It operates in the financial services sector so has information about customer buying habits outside of Tesco for Tesco Bank customers.

5. It has magazines, posters, online advertising – all revenue (and ultimately profit) generating.

6. It has a mobile network which is growing fast. And it has all the associated data that goes with that – call and SMS patterns, mobile data usage – all linked to the clubcard and transaction data.

7. It now has mobile apps – and a growing suite of them. And an ethos that “simpler is better”. You can read more about Tesco’s foray into the world of mobile apps at Nick Lansley’s TechForTesco blog.

8. They know how to negotiate deals and how to work with suppliers to drive down the cost of production to improve their profit margins (this is not always good for the producer, but Tesco has this down to a fine art.

9. They’re focused on customers - customer service and getting the in-store experience right (not perfect, but good enough enough of the time that customers are satisfied) is key. They spend a fortune on staff training which includes customer service. And they have staff on hand to answer your queries and give you a smile (mostly) when you shop with them. I don’t know if this is replicated with the online shopping experience or not as I don’t use Tesco for online shopping.

10. It has really deep pockets. Like really deep. Did I mention they’ve been making £6,000 a minute PROFIT?

So what if Tesco were to really take on the mobile world? What might it look like?

Well, the app store would be more focussed and better organised (simpler is better). The apps perhaps could be bought on a wholesale basis rather than a revenue share. That way, rather than piling it high and selling it cheap, a proper selection process could happen and the app store’s shelf space would be limited (just like it is in real life). You’d earn loyalty points with each sale. Points can be used against rewards or money off any of your shopping at Tesco (whether that’s Tesco Mobile or your grocery shopping). Not only that, but the developers might be able to negotiate a better revenue share deal.

And what about if we looked beyond the app store. How about if Tesco provided suppliers (be that FMCG, mobile apps, clothing, whatever) with a full-service marketing option. Customer insight (based on transaction data plus mobile data cross matched with qualitative stuff and all opt-in) with multiple routes to market via mobile, magazine, posters (digital and physical posters), product placement, shelf offers (digital and physical), location-based (based on your usual local store and/or your actual physical location). Add in cross-marketing opportunities between different media and apps across the Tesco portfolio – now that would be a very powerful offering.

And what about if Tesco were to take on some web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 principles and built-in customer collaboration, accessibility to the tools which isn’t just based on how much money you have, and working with producers and suppliers to help them improve the supply chain process to cut costs and improve margins?

Could that happen? Would that happen? Would we want it to happen? (I can see there are a whole bunch of data privacy issues looming with it – will data monopolies be banned like company monopolies are?)

Are the network operators still making so much more money that they make Tesco look like chicken feed? Is Tesco the David to the MNO’s Goliath?

Comments, thoughts?

Technorati Tags: mobile,m-commerce,mobile marketing,future of mobile

MePlease launches today and shares interesting case studies

It’s about time I blogged a few things as it has been a while and I feel no better place to start than with MePlease. I’ve known about MePlease for some time now as I met the founder, Steve Jarrett, over a year ago at The Tuttle Club and it was then that I first heard about his plans to launch a new company to provide mobile and social marketing services to retailers. Some of you may know that this is a topic close to my heart having spent my early career in fashion retail and more than 10 years ago, was part of the start-up team at ZagMe, the world’s first location-based mobile marketing service (sadly no longer). With all that in mind, I am certainly critical of mobile marketing services to retailers – sometimes overly so. But that’s because I’ve been there, done that and can quickly see the holes in a new service. I’m pleased to say that this isn’t the case with MePlease. With several solid and successful client campaigns under their belt, they’re now in full launch mode and sent me their latest press release.

So what is MePlease and what’s so special about them?

MePlease is an integrated social and mobile marketing platform that provides businesses with powerful ways to engage customers on their mobiles, along with easy social media sharing. Just as importantly, their platform gives people using MePlease complete control over which businesses can interact with them and how often. [I like the fact they’re combining ubiquitous SMS with mobile web and social media. No, SMS couponing isn’t unique, they’re not the first to do it, but I believe they’re doing it right, and I know for a fact they have a strong management and investment team.] And you can see how it works in this short video clip featuring Me Please's Cait Roberts (you may recognise her from TechfluffTV and Mobile Monday London.

MePlease In Action at PizzaExpress from MePlease on Vimeo.

The MePlease team also tell me that its mobile social platform makes any marketing campaign interactive, measurable and shareable. It has the ability to include voting, competitions, customer feedback, location check-ins and the sending of treats and promotions.  Using SMS, mobile web, facebook and more, this enables companies to help achieve specific business goals such as increasing loyalty, acquiring new customers, and driving footfall. MePlease provides a seamless experience with social media, especially Facebook’s Open Graph, making it easy for anyone to share MePlease treats and invitations with friends.  Importantly, however, with MePlease customers are in control of what companies they hear from and how often. Unlike mobile location or voucher-based applications, MePlease works on any phone and can connect with any business or service, from national brands to small businesses. [Sounds pretty comprehensive to me and worth a look if your game is retail. And I know they also have ways to be location-based without a customer needing to have a smartphone.]

Pizza Express ‘Create Your Pizza Challenge’ Campaign

PizzaExpress, the UK’s favourite high-street pizzeria (well, it’s certainly my favourite high-street pizzeria and a firm favourite with the Mobile Monday London team), is among the first to take advantage of the MePlease’s integrated social media and mobile platform in an upcoming national campaign.

PizzaExpress is using the MePlease system to enable interactive customer voting during the final round of their ‘Create Your Pizza Challenge’, which has already drawn over 48,000 entries since the competition opened (not too shabby a response I would say). Through on-table displays in every PizzaExpress locations from October 18th to November 14th, customers will be prompted to text-in their vote for one of the five finalist pizzas they would like to see on the menu. Once customers text-in, they will also be able to post their vote directly to Facebook to encourage viral sharing via MePlease.

John Sullivan, Director of Group IT at Gondola Group, (PizzaExpress’s parent company), said, “We really like that MePlease enables us to directly engage with our customers using their trusted one-to-one communication channel.  Recently over 10% of our MePlease users texted in for a special lunch event at our Richmond restaurant; this response rate was very encouraging and happened within 15 minutes of sending the initial call to action.” [We had similar response rates to this when we launched ZagMe so I’m not surprised at this figure. It is most definitely achievable.]

Steve Jarrett, CEO and Founder of MePlease commented, "Most businesses know they should be doing more with mobile and social media. I am hugely proud that our world-class team has created such a powerful, yet simple and fun way for businesses to engage with their customers and friends – while allowing each person to retain complete control about what they receive and from whom. There’s nothing else like the MePlease service available today and I’m really excited about the ways in which businesses are already using the platform.”

MePlease’s current clients include: PizzaExpress, Cineworld, Jack Wills, Nimax Theatre Group, Jongleur’s Comedy Clubs, Ted Baker, Waxy O’Connors’ Pubs, 333 Holdings, Kick Fitness, Tonicity Spa, William Thomas Hair, House Keepers London, Got Fitness and Fancy Dress.

And if you think this Pizza Express campaign is a one-off, then they’ve also achieved great results with many more, including the  Tragus Group (Bella Pasta, Strada and Cafe Rouge):

Project: 6 month trial at selected Tragus locations in London in order to prove viability of national rollout to 250+ UK restaurants

Key Results: 

• 9% average text redemption rate
• 53% redemption rate for single campaign
• 20% joined via sharing or signing up online

And also Jongleurs:

Project: Promote Jongleurs’ new comedy club Sway, Covent Garden London during August, a typically quiet month

Key Results:

• Drove up to 25% of the club’s footfall on Friday
  nights during one month, including ticket sales and
  food/beverage purchase
• Increased ROI by 40% in one month

“We are really pleased with the results of our first MePlease campaign. From a sales and marketing perspective, August is our most challenging month so the fact that MePlease filled up to a quarter of our seats that month is a truly outstanding result.”
- Will Beckett, Operations Manager, Jongleurs

Technorati Tags: mobile marketing,sms marketing,retail marketing,pizza express,MePlease,mobile advertising,sms advertising

Links ‘n stuff cos it’s Wednesday

As usual I have too many browser tabs and emails open so it’s time to close them down by documenting them here. Forgive them being a bit random but hopefully there’s a few things here that might catch your eye to take a further look.

T-Mobile is using bluetooth to attract customers into store with special offers. I’ve written about bluetooth marketing bluespam before. On private property, I have no problem with it but when it’s catching random people in the street, because they happen to have their bluetooth switched on it makes me feel uncomfortable. Anyway, it seems T-Mobile doesn’t feel uncomfortable with it (or uncufderbull as my 8 year old neighbour once wrote to me describing his boarding school bed).

BMW spend $30k on an engaging MMS campaign and sell $45 million of accessories to existing customers… now that’s pretty cool.

Young people who embrace technology can feel overconnected (well, I would add, that you don’t need to be a teenager to feel this – I’m definitely in that number… I’m frequently overwhelmed by information and communication coming in at me from all directions).

The latest Pew Internet Report is out. Essential reading for all folks working or interested in digital and mobile.

The economic downturn bodes well for mobile couponing companies according to RCR Wireless. I suspect few of the services on offer are really delivering on the mobile couponing promise – I know a thing or two about mobile coupons and there are a lot of skittles to get in a row before it succeeds. That said, Planet Funk sees 377% ROI on their mobile couponing promotion so when you get it right, it can be very powerful.

Orange UK also announces key findings from their mobile marketing research:

• 81% of mobile media users access mobile media once a week with strong usage in the home, as well as on public transport and around town
• Mobile media users are very much open to mobile marketing with 70% of participants attracted by interactive marketing formats
• The most popular forms of mobile marketing currently are click-through advertisements and voucher redemption codes
• Mobile is viewed as the most innovative and personal media channel compared to all other traditional and digital channels

Other key findings on mobile media usage included:

• The average age for mobile media users is 36, and 81% use mobile media more than once a week with 46% using it daily
• Men generally use mobile media more, although women are much more likely to use picture messaging
• The mobile internet pages viewed most often are search engines, email, news, music and film although, interestingly, a high proportion (55%) of people browse the mobile internet with no specific agenda, providing an opportunity for marketers to attract their attention

The research also confirms that customers are after value and relevance. No big surprise there then. Marketers take note.

Technorati Tags: mobile marketing,mobile media,research,mobile internet,mobile coupons,bluetooth,bluespam,MMS

Papa John's generates $1m in sales in the USA

 

I've just been reading about Papa John's foray into mobile commerce over at Mobile Marketer.

"Pizza chain Papa John’s International Inc. has generated more than $1 million in sales from mobile Web orders in less than six months after offering that option to consumers.

The milestone comes after Papa John’s earlier this year crossed more than $1 billion in overall online sales – up from $400 million in 2007 – and launched a Facebook page that quickly attracted 175,000-plus fans in less than a week. The mobile commerce push led to the introduction yesterday of an iphone site for Papa John’s."

So it looks like Papa John's is doing pretty well then. 1% of overall sales via mobile sounds about right to me. And no mean feat to accomplish that within 6 months of launch.

You can see the mobile site at http://www.mobile.papajohns.com. It's completely reliant on setting up an account with Papa John's which can all be done from your phone and once registered you can link through to your local Papa John's menu and delivery options. You can also use the related SMS service once you've created an account. It remembers your favourite pizzas so reordering is faster.

At the moment about 20% of all orders are via digital channels, including mobile but the powers that be suggest that digital channels may overtake voice pretty soon.

The also note that the digital orderers of pizza are typical Papa John's customers and are not specifically youth or after smaller orders (which makes sense to me as you do have to register and can't just order off the cuff - of course once registered, it's easier the next time). And I suspect the iphone application is even easier to use. And of course it makes perfect sense. You can order your pizza from the bus or train on your way home and you arrive home at the same time as your pizza. Brilliant! Certainly less annoying than shouting your order down the phone with the rest of the passengers listening in to what you're going to have for dinner.

Admittedly, I don't order pizzas very often, but I just might if it was that simple to do from my phone already without having to hunt for the leaflet that got stuck through the door and probably went straight into my recycling bin anyway.

I remember talking to Papa John's agency in the UK many moons ago about a very similar service but the idea was ditched in favour of printing more leaflets. But then that's another story...

Technorati Tags: papa johns,pizza,m-commerce,mobile commerce,mobile coupons,mobile ordering,mobile web

How not to do mobile marketing... Subway style

A friend just alerted me to this review of Subway's latest mobile marketing effort in the US. It's a tale of how not to do mobile couponing essentially. I suggest you give it a good read, but the upshot is that the coupons are only available in a few locations, namely Buffalo, NY and Seattle, WA markets. I can understand starting with some kind of pilot scheme, it makes sense to iron out any issues with a smaller set of customers before going national.

Anyway, back to the campaign. It's supported by the My Subway Mobile website and with flyers in store locations (where the offer is valid). The author of the article, Jay Holcomb, tells us about his experience:

"... despite my sincerest efforts, I had a very difficult time at both Subway locations where I tried to redeem my code that allows for a free sub upon creating account. Each location had the campaign flyers at the cash register, but the problem was to be found in the employees themselves: they had no idea about the campaign! I pointed it out to a total of four employees in these two locations, and no one had ever heard of it before."

A campaign is only as good as it's weakest link and clearly, in Subway's case, the staff were the weakest link. Or was it that staff training was the weakest link. There's no point dumping a load of flyers on your shop counter with the latest offer if you don't brief your team properly. That's something we learned very quickly back in ZagMe days and we spent a lot of time working with store staff and their teams bringing them up to speed with the latest offers and how it all worked.

Mobile marketing isn't just about the technology. The technology is only a small part of it. Your people, your brand, your service all play a part in it too.

You have been warned... don't make the same mistake!

Random links on a First Monday

Beating congestion with mobile phones: This is nifty. In Rome, the authorities are using mobile phone signals to work out traffic hot spots over time so they can work out where the traffic jams will be in the future and therefore work out ways of keeping the traffic moving.

A very thorough article on how to monetise your mobile site with advertising including top tips on using the major players - Admob, Yahoo, Google and also some technical tips and hints. Well worth a look.

A write up by pal Tom on agency.com's buzzword take on online social networking. I have to say, I agree with him which is why I haven't written a piece on it and instead I am directing you to read his instead.

Whilst I was enjoying the Carnival that was Glastonbury, my fellow mobilists have been busy beavering away at the latest two instalments of the carnival of the mobilists... No 79 from Jag at Route 79 is rather good (well I would say that as he gives me a plug!) and incredibly thorough. And this week's, No 80, from my fellow female mobilist, Debi over at Mobile Jones., where she does a top job of rounding up this week's mobile writing.

Some older news but worth noting anyway...

Pandora launches personal radio for mobile. A great step forward, but until we have proper flat rate data plans, this ain't gonna fly which is why the launch is with Sprint so I can't test it to tell you what it's like.

Borders are doing mobile couponing in the UK and it appears to be an unqualified success. Although I'd love to see a comparision with other similar couponing activity they may have done and I'd also like to take a gander at the point of sale materials. The fact that it's mobile is possibly not the critical success factor here and I expect it's a combination of things.. can anyone give me any more info?