As if it were not hard enough for marketers to know where to begin with respect to mobile marketing, companies like SnapTag and JagTag are creating confusion around one of the most talked about mobile applications: bar codes.
This January 7, 2009 post on MobileMarketingWatch.com describes an offering by a new company called JagTag that offers a very similar service to SnapTag (which we blogged about here back in October of 2009).
These services appeal to marketer’s fears about the limited reach of smartphones capable of reading bar codes. This is due to the somewhat real issue of handsets often needing special software to interpret the codes. When marketers think about bar codes on mobile devices, they should break down the options as follows:
- As a coupon delivery and redeeming method.
- As a replacement for plastic cards (like your grocery store loyalty or video store cards).
- As a means of communicating information and/or pointing consumers to rich mobile interactions.
What Jag and Snap Tags do is imply that by using relatively ubiquitous MMS-enabled camera phones, consumers can be called to action as follows: take a picture of a code, send it via MMS, then receive of something of value – pointers to websites, a text message, offer, coupon code, etc.
I fail to see how this adds value to an interaction in the mobile channel versus even more common SMS text messaging. The only case I can identify is when a brand wants to create an arguably fun activity for a consumer whereby they have a chance to use the camera feature/MMS sending capability of their phone. That is a very weak scenario in my view.
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