Google takes ambitious steps to secure position in mobile commerce arena

For the past year, Google has been showing strong interest in mobile commerce and online retail. The company’s Google Wallet has been somewhat well received by consumers around the world, many of whom praise the product’s ability to make purchasing products more convenient. Google has seen significant growth in the mobile commerce and retail arenas, which has lead to confrontation with companies that have long held dominance in these industries, such as Amazon.

Channel Intelligence platform could be a major boon for Google

In a move to make itself more competitive with Amazon, Google has announced the acquisition of Channel Intelligence, a data management platform for retailer inventory. Channel Intelligence could give Google the tools it needs to make major progress in the realm of e-commerce. The platform holds a vast amount of information concerning retail advertisers. Using the platform, Google will be able to access detailed retailer pricing and inventory data, as well as data on how retailers convert shoppers into dedicated customers. The platform is expected to give Google better pricing power over its own advertisements.

Platform to help Google provide better services to retailers

The Channel Intelligence platform will help Google offer better options to retailers concerning advertising through its widely used search engine. This will allow the company to establish a more dominant foothold in the world of online shopping and likely set it to directly compete with Amazon. Consumers have already proven that they rely heavily on online search to make their shopping more efficient, but more of these consumers are using mobile devices to shop and research products. Amazon already has a significant lead over Google in regards to catering to mobile consumers.

Mobile commerce demand growing among consumers

Mobile commerce continues to be a strong focus for Google and other companies interested in the retail industry. The demand for mobile commerce services among consumers has reached the point where it can no longer be ignored by retailers, thus these companies are making a push to accommodate the needs and interests of these consumers more adequately. Google has seen a major opportunity for growth in providing these retailers with tools that could make them more effective in the field of mobile commerce.

The ESPN College Football campaign used the barcodes to generate hundreds of thousands of scans.

The outcome of the ESPN College Football mobile marketing campaign have now been released by Taco Bell, which has revealed that the QR codes from their product packages were scanned 225,000 times in less than two months.

This marketing effort was part of the overall Bowl Championship series campaign.

Taco Bell feels that this achievement was a considerable one. This is not the first time that the fast food chain has run mobile marketing campaigns that have used QR codes. This time, it is receiving applause from many in the industry for the way that the barcodes were applied in order to generate the greatest amount of attention and use.

The QR codes were placed on the soda cups and the 12 pack taco boxes throughout the campaign.

Those items could be scanned using a smartphone and any scanner app designed for reading QR codes – of which there are many available for free. When a customer scanned the barcode, he or she was redirected to analyst Mark May’s previews that were presented for the upcoming games in the series. The initial launch of this campaign was on December 20, and it ran right through until February 3.

The QR codes saw periods of higher and lower popularity, coming to a high point as the games were actually taking place. However, after January 7, there was not as much attention seen by the barcodes, simply because the National Championship Game had already been played by that point. This was, however, a matter of context and the company does not at all consider it to be a failure of the campaign.

Behind the management of the QR codes was Snipp Interactive. Its CEO, Atul Sabharwal, pointed out a number of elements that led to the success and high rate of use in the campaign. He also shared that he feels that this is a prime example of the true potential of these smartphone friendly barcodes as a “mobile response mechanism”. He added that “It’s even more impressive when you consider that this wasn’t a contest, sweepstakes or giveaway, which have traditionally always generated high volumes of responses.”