Category: Featured News

German Maestro revealed its latest support for retailers through in-store mobile marketing.

German Maestro, a company that specializes in audio technology such as speakers and headphones, unveiled its latest consumer experience enhancement at CES, when it announced its latest program for helping to educate customers through QR codes located on product displays.

This is a continuation of last year’s “Ask Me” program which empowered retailers to educate consumers.

The Ask Me program was created to provide the sales reps at the retail locations with an improved capability for educating consumers who are interested in the brand or products, or who have questions that need to be answered in order to make a purchasing decision. The success of that program has encouraged the company to extend it with the assistance of consumer smartphones.

This year, German Maestro revealed that it would be using QR codes that lead to videos, as well.

The president of the company, Ray Windsor, explained that German Maestro is hoping that the consumer will be able to experience the brand in an enhanced and interesting way right from the moment that he or she enters the store, even if the sales rep has not yet had the opportunity to reach the point where that individual happens to be standing.

According to that company, the answer they were seeking was in the smartphones that those consumers carried, in combination with QR codes that could be strategically positioned within the stores. This allows the brand to combine the mobile and in-store experience for an improved overall experience for the customer.

The QR codes are positioned on the product displays for German Maestro products within the retail stores. Therefore, regardless of whether or not a representative from the retailer has reached the consumer in order to assist him or her, additional information about the brand and the specific product is available.

When a customer uses a smartphone to scan the QR codes for the products, they will be automatically directed to a 90 second video that will provide general information about the brand as a whole, as well as its partners. Once that is complete, it will bring the customer to the brand’s website, on a page that provides information about the specific product that has captured the attention of the shopper.

According to Windsor, what the company is aiming to achieve through the use of the QR codes is to “try to herd the consumers into the brick and mortar guys, because that’s where the value add comes, we believe, in delivering our brand to market.”

Survey highlights the issues that gamers have with mobile gaming

Mobile gaming has become a fun and important pastime for a wide variety of consumers all over the world. Like other consumers, gamers are a very picky bunch, and anything they perceive as a significant challenge to their gaming experience could have major consequences for mobile gaming. A new survey from Ebuyer, an e-commerce retailer based in the United Kingdom, highlights the challenges that face mobile gaming, and what gamers consider to be one of the most significant problems with most of today’s popular mobile games.

Poor controls cause irritation for gamers

According to the Ebuyer survey poor controls are one of the most problematic issue facing mobile gaming today. Given that the vast majority of these games are developed with a touch screen in mind, creating a control interface that can be both accurate and effective has been a serious challenge for nearly all developers of mobile games. Touch screens are not designed specifically for games, thus have limited functionality when it comes to gaming. According to the survey, 23% of gamers said that controls were often so irritating that they refused to play mobile games.

Micro-transactions and bugs are also a top issue

Controls are not the only problems gamers have with the mobile space, of course. The survey shows that 20% of gamers claim that micro-transactions are problematic in some regard. These gamers suggest that micro-transactions are either completely unjustified or that they are too difficult to use. In some cases, a poorly implemented micro-transaction system has led gamers to spend significantly more money than they had initially intended because of their repeated efforts to get the system to work properly. Bugs and glitches were also a problem for gamers. Approximately 17% of the survey’s respondents claimed that bugs were irritating enough to stop them from playing games.

Advertising proves to be the most problematic issue

The chief issue that gamers have with the mobile gaming space, however, is in-game advertisements. More than 40% of the survey’s respondents claimed that these advertisements were a very problematic issue and that they would be willing to pay significant fees in order to not have to see these advertisements at all. While these problems represent aspects of mobile gaming that are well on their way to becoming infamous, finding solutions to these problems is likely to be a difficult task for developers.