1:32 AM
Diana D'Cruz
Article written by Julien Saumande. An engineer by training, he has created Phoceis in 2002. Phoceis is a consultancy business and marketing that accompanies digital brands in the development and implementation of their digital strategy, on mobile devices and nomadic. The company has positioned itself in the mobile industry since 2008 and has developed one of the first applications of m-commerce from the App Store.
Nearly a month after the release of the iPhone 5, back over four weeks of news around the new "connected commerce" iOS6 of the passbook.
Passbook: If you missed the beginning ...
The Passbook is a new application appeared with version 6 operating system iPhone iOS6. Fifteen days after its release, nearly half of iPhone users had migrated iOS6 and could therefore access Passbook with the icon on the home page of their phone.
The native application passbook to transfer to your iPhone, in their electronic form, the following documents:
- Loyalty card
- Discount coupons, loyalty checks, gift cards
- Boarding pass, train ticket, hotel reservation
- Tickets
Ads follow
United States, there have been many signs to quickly launch the Passbook. Starbucks, Sephora (which announced 80,000 loyalty cards swung the Passbook in a few days), American Airlines ... there are countless ads.
MLB (Major League Baseball) has stated that, from the start, 12% of e-tickets were generated via the Passbook.
All have certainly realized that this was the first movement magnitude Apple in mobile commerce. And adding, tomorrow or after tomorrow, functionality payment would create a real value chain in a booming sector but where NFC is struggling to impose.
Auchan pass the bar 10.000 passbooks
In France, Auchan fired first in retail, with the support of the application Passbook MyAuchan from the day iOS6 output. The brand has also just announced that they have surpassed the 10.000 Passbooks generated in two weeks.
The approach to teaching northerner was twofold.
1. First of all, allow tilting of the loyalty card house (Waaoh) directly in the Passbook, in order to scan the card in hand and check the balance of fidelity.
2. But also to offer "experience Passbook" to all customers whether or not the sign, allowing failover of any promotion of the leaflet in the Passbook: So, passing near the mall, the offer is recalled on the lock screen of the iPhone. Similarly, when the offer is about to expire.
Auchan was followed by McDonalds and Kinepolis. Air France will be interested as well, and it is hard to miss the SNCF given their continuous movement towards paperless tickets. Some technical obstacles remain to be solved (see below), but there are solutions.
The next move could come from direct marketing operations. At present, most of the ads relate to the support of the Passbook by iPhone applications.
But we must not lose sight of another mode of diffusion is possible by a simple link or, better, by an attachment to an email. One can imagine that tomorrow, it is proposed to mobinaute receive directly in his mailbox a coupon, teaches recovering at the same time valuable information on the client to enhance its CRM.
And Now?
Passbook still suffers from the lack of youth (or gaps volunteers, it depends interpretations): most of it is the lack of support for traditional barcodes (EAN13, EAN128). It is now possible to "cheat" with the first, second display remains technically impossible.
However, much of the retail French (and European) uses this type of bar code. Migration to the park type of 2D code solutions at the scale of a leading brand, is a challenge that only Passbook often does not justify (yet) meet. However, there are alternatives that can overcome these difficulties, but hopefully Apple offers a short-term solution to this problem.
In addition, the system of the generation and interconnection with Passbooks systems (loyalty, CRM, marketing, cash) signs is also complex and requires expertise that currently has very little agency.
But the adoption of the Passbook by retailers will perhaps have to make a forced march: we can rely on the Apple machine to promote the tool and evangelize the masses of its users Passbook. By the end of 2012, no less than 5 million mobile users who have automatic access to the Passbook.
