In the past two years, companies have started to explore the possibilities of using the mobile phone as a marketing channel and the notion of displaying a bar-code on the mobile phone display has become synonymous with this evolving market. Some early entrants to this market demonstrate this simple feature as a totemistic symbol that they have mastered the art of mobile marketing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Barcodes (EAN codes) are a graphic representation of an eight or a thirteen digit number (known as EAN-8´s and EAN-13´s) and they are deeply embedded with in the retail industry as they allow fast and reliable identification of products at point-of-sale keeping customer queues to a minimum and providing near instant sales data for the supply chain. The body that administers the use of barcodes is EAN International and they have licensed prefixes and ‘blocks’ of numbers to organizations to ensure the numbers remain unique and the problems caused by the same number representing different business information is avoided. Although eight numbers might at first to offer a near-infinite number of permutations, the first two numbers are reserved to denote the type of barcode (an offer, a product and so on) and the last one is a checksum digit used to validate the code as genuine. Consequently, only five digits are available for the unique code and herein lies one of the issues with using them on mobile phones.
The typical display of a modern mobile phone is only large enough to display an EAN-8. The vast majority of these codes is in use and therefore cannot be used for new promotions and products. For this reason, most retailers and manufacturers use EAN-13's and these are simply too wide to be accommodated on most mobile phone displays. True, some modern designs have screens large enough to display an EAN-13 but these are not prevalent and would ignore the mass market. In doing so, a niche proposition based on specific mobile phone designs is of little interest to most issuers of coupons and vouchers.
Bizarrely, one vendor in this market is recommending the use of unique EAN-8's for each customer receiving a coupon in any promotion. Just to be clear this would mean a single promotion sent to one million consumers would generate one million barcodes. Equally bizarre is the systems behind this which requires integration of ANY Point of Sale (PoS) system where vouchers are accepted to be integrated, real-time, to the voucher system to allow redemption to be tracked and multiple redemptions avoided. Quite apart from the fact there are not enough unallocated EAN-8's to allow this to function in any event, the Herculean task of invasive integration to every PoS system in the UK cannot even be charted.
Other problems abound. Only the most modern photo-scanners that take a picture of the barcode and then process the image against a database of images are a reliable means of processing the barcode and very few retailers have invested in this technology as yet and are unlikely to make capital investments of this sort to support the fledgling mobile marketing industry. Existing equipment from the UK's leading supplier of PoS scanners achieves only a 65% success rate on 8-digit bar codes owing to wide range is quality and dimensions - particularly the thickness - of the screen over the display of the phone.
Low scan success rates and the limited future-use of 8 digit barcodes lead to the inevitable conclusion that while the barcode on the phone is arresting "eye-candy" in the development of the mobile marketing industry, it has few practical applications at present. Moreover it does nothing to address the real issues of controlled and secure redemption which remain the twin "Holy Grails" in this market.
