Face à la chute de ses revenus et la concurrence accrue de Mcdo sur le segment “café” Starbucks sort le grand jeu avec un programme de “rewards” très agressif incluant notamment une boisson offerte à l’activation, des “refills” gratuits de café et surtout la connexion Wifi gratuite pour les porteurs de la carte.

Plus d’infos ici

Un commentaire critique sur cette initiative ici

Le commentaire insiste notamment sur le fait que le succès de Starbucks s’est construit sur l’expérience client comme complément naturel de l’offre produit en elle-même, il est donc dommage que Starbucks n’ait pas cherché à mettre en œuvre un programme plus orienté “expérience” / “reconnaissance” que “récompense”…

McDonalds Japan has released Kazasu Coupon, an innovative mobile contactless solution including coupons download and payment card.

This is a nice first step as paper coupons is very popular in Japan. But the ultimate killer app’ for fast food is to enable “Order building” on the mobile, which is far more complicated as it requires total integration into the restaurant POS and ordering software.

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Oberthur Technologies, one of the world’s leading smart card suppliers, in partnership with AIRTAG – an innovative start-up dedicated to NFC (Near Field Communication) applications - today announced the demonstration of the NFC Mobile Kiosk for fast food at the Mobile World Congress, which is the first fully integrated NFC multiplications service featuring marketing and payment services…

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NFC technology penetration will take time. Before a wide base of NFC handsets is spread on the market there is a very important opportunity to roll-out contactless applications and start boosting usage especially for new payment and marketing applications.

Refer to this very interesting article mentionning the success of contactless phone straps in Korea : Retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID

Also refer to the GSPOT project, an interactive loyalty card used as a marketing tool for a fashion retailer in Paris: GSPOT, a contactless loyalty program for GEDENIM

Oystar Product Page >>>

And More here

Here is a nice description (in French…), of the contactless revolution in Japan, and particularly explaining the value added of such services for retailers (gain in service time, promotion, loyalty etc…)
>>> more info here