When used to pay for goods and services the mobile phone provides a personalised time-stamp on a transaction. This provides information on who purchased what, when and where collecting digital analytics from previously analogue customers.
This allows you to use sophisticated data analytics to react and influence your customers instantly and automatically.
Whilst fundamental human motivations don’t change that much – the way we act on them do. One thing we have always done and will continue to do is buy the things we want and need, and try to seek out the best value whilst doing so. We will always transact, how we do so will always continue to evolve.
Our transaction history as humans began with a bartering economy, using animals as currency. We have seen an evolution of currency and trading habits through the ages from the shekel to early metal coins, precious metal coins, the banknote (FACTOID: the first banknote was a white leather hide) to gold, then retail making a play with store charge cards, credit cards, e-commerce (the first online transaction was a Pizza from Pizza Hut). We now have contactless and mobile payment, and there are even burgeoning technologies that use facial recognition to take payment. Further embedded technologies are appearing all the time.
Exciting, no? Not to mention lucrative and fast-moving. These products allows us to better understand and shape behavior by providing data, lots of lovely data, to be studied and reacted to in real-time. We have gained invaluable practical knowledge in this area, and I term this ‘Emerging Commerce’. There are many technologies that profess to have ‘the answer’ to this entire market but I don’t believe that a one size fits all solution will be the winner. The key here is making sure you use the technologies that best suit your immediate business drivers and future ambitions.
This space is going to be very important and that the smart brands have already earmarked this as a method to not only grow their user base but also communicate with them in a meaningful and useful way.
Charles Cadbury 