Postcards from Perkistan

While we quietly work away on our iPhone app here in Perkler HQ (yes it’s coming and yes it will be relevant to making your loyalty shopping easier), we thought we would take a look at a couple of loyalty apps that are on the market already and take them for a spin.

To be frank, the tie in between retailers and loyalty on the phone is pretty lean. While there are plenty of loyalty services companies developing technology, Australian retailers still seem reluctant to link perks to purchasing in the mobile space.

Let’s hope loyalty gets its act together and starts getting out there with the Lasoo and Get Prices of the world!

And if you’ve come across a loyalty app let us know all about it, we’ll happily take a look.

For the moment, here are a couple we’ve been impressed with.

Flybuys - iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

In all honesty we’ve been really impressed with the work the Flybuys team have been doing over recent months. The launch of Everyday Rewards has really kicked the market along and the result is a revitalisation of competing programs.

The app itself has everything you would expect from a coalition points program. The basic menu covers stores, rewards and points balances.

Set up can take a little while as you need to establish a password to keep authentication secure - but that seems a small price to pay for an updated points balance. And that’s one of the great pieces of information - not just current points but importantly when they expire - critical if you want to make sure you use them effectively.

The wishlist section is clear and allows you to set up goals so that you know what you are ‘earning’ towards, and the store locator is a neat feature with so many brands available under the one program.

All in all a nice little package.

Choice Hotels - iPhone and PDA / “standard” mobile phone platforms

Hotel Chains are perfectly placed to take advantage of the app market. With multiple brands, multiple locations and last minute booking all the ingredients are there for a great app. Choice Australia utilises its international connections to bring you a comprehensive app across multiple platforms.

You can search hotels from 10 brands - that’s an enormous range to choose from - and then make reservations. Importantly from a loyalty point of view you can access your account (it throws you to a secure but clunky webpage) so that you can see point balance and redeem straight from that balance.

With the range of hotels these guys have this is GPS heaven - and the loyalty account tie in ticks all the right boxes for us. A bit more design work on the web pages and it would be the total package!

So that’s two…

I guess the development required for an app and tying in loyalty is a reasonable investment, but surely linking earn and particularly burn  to the point of purchase is a critical part of the modern retailer’s armoury.

I can only assume Everyday Rewards, Qantas and lots of others are working on their mobile malls now…Would be interesting to know what their thoughts on this channel and how it links to loyalty are.

As far as we go, we are putting the final touches to our app - which in true Perkler style will seek to bring your whole wallet to life, more on ‘Perky Shopper’ soon.

It’s been a very long time since our last post, which means we have been a bit slack but also means we have been up to our necks in work - which is a good thing.

Those following Dan or I on Twitter (@JustinBarrie and @BigHittingLama) would know that we’ve just been overseas for a market validation trip to the UK. 

As winners of the Australian Final of the Technium Challenge we were lucky enough to be taken over to Swansea to compete in the global final. A week long cultural tour introduced us to all that the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) are doing to support businesses (and encourage them to enter Wales as a base) and also gave us a look around a range of cities and towns like Cardiff and Aberystwyth.

We didn’t win the global final - we tell our families we can runner-up - but the experience was excellent.

The WAG have some very interesting support packages including running the 11 Technium Centres - incubators that allow companies an “easy-in easy-out” approach to setting up an office. The WAG also have a very vibrant Finance arm - Finance Wales and strong Angel Community - Xenos. All very interesting stuff.

The second half of our week was down in London. We had three days chocked full of meetings with interested investors, potential strategic partners and most interestingly some really high-quality retailers.

We learnt from brands like French Connection and the Arcadia Group (representing fantastic brands like Miss Selfridges, Dorothy Perkins and Top Shop that the idea of Perkler very much translates to the UK market. We were pleased that with very little adjustment it could become a very successful export market for us.

We also learnt that the expectations of retailers in the mobile space in particular seems to be significantly more advanced than here in Oz or even than in the US (where we were last year). Most of the meetings focused on how the Perkler mobile platform can be extended to really enhance loyalty offerings which was really exciting for us and our future product runway.

Overall I’d say that the UK retailers were very focused on loyalty stopping being a “met too” industry and really looking for ways to really reward loyal customers. Particularly interesting was their desire to link loyalty directly to ‘live’ performance of a particular physical retail location on any given day. Using the loyalty program to drive customers in when times are slow. Very very interesting notion.

On the investment front there seemed to be a fairly buoyant mood. The Australian Government should probably take note of some pretty good initiatives like the London Technology Fund which combine the best of private venture discipline with a softer government approach - we were very impressed. The WAG also had a range of funding options that were very attractive to the right business at the right time.

So the trip was extremely valuable for us in terms of understanding where to after Australia, but also in re-confirming that we need to focus on the Australian launch (only weeks away) and get it right here. And that’s exactly what we are doing.

Negotiations are fairly advanced with a couple of really good brands here at home, and Adam is working bloody hard to get the new version of the site up and ready for solid QA next week ahead of the launch.

For the launch itself we have appointed Magnum PR to lead off our campaign. We are really excited about working with the guys and know that a sustained campaign (combined with our product offering real value to consumers and retailers) will result in some great commercial partnerships and, most importantly, a big intake of members getting value from Perkler.

So back to work - but more regular posts now that we are back in Oz. Don’t forget to follow our community manager Graham on Twitter as well @perkler. 

Last thing to report is that whilst in London we were lucky enough to score Centre Court Wimbledon tickets on Ladies Quarter Final day. The seats were amazing and we ended up right next to the members. I can assure you all (because I know you’re wondering) Sir Cliff Richard’s tan is quite extraordinary!

Justin

Extremely interesting news coming out of the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. New Media Age in the UK reports that a number of keynotes sought to address the issue of an increasingly fragmented app market and the implications of this moving forward.

The list is extraordinarily large (though not surprising) for such a young industry. Apple, Orange, Microsoft, Google, Blackberry, Nokia, Samsung and O2 have all launched (or are launching) stores, and more importantly (worryingly), platforms for apps development and distribution.

The business man in me says that this makes perfect sense. Immature market, large global players trying to vie for dominant position and doing so the only way large companies know how to - by developing unique platforms and hoping they win the war (or a portion of it).

Then, inevitably, the launch of multiple platforms and stores is met with the cry for standards and cooperation (I can see the committee forming in The Hague right now…). So even before some stores have launched, people are crying out for a centralisation of the market!

The complicating factor in the most recent store announcements (Samsung, Orange etc) is that I understand platforms offering different stores, but hardware manufacturers offering stores that then offer multiple platforms (I assume) just completely complicates the market.

The long and the short of it for a start-up like us is that we simply have to pick our targets, and that number is going to be substantially less than the players I’ve listed above. We have to do analysis of our audience and each store/platform’s audience and pick the platform most likely to deliver us customers. That’s okay and relatively easy at a pure platform level. We have decided to go iPhone app in the first instance and are working hard with MoGeneration in Sydney to create a meaningful and powerful app for our users.

We always envisaged moving to Blackberry for the corporate market and then Symbian for our second (to iPhone) consumer market. Apologies to the companies involved for the generalisations of your user groups

Now we have to contend with making decisions about those platforms and then extrapolate that out to unique requirements at a hardware (Samsung) and carrier (Orange) level - crazy!

So what do I think will happen? The same thing that happens in most maturing markets. People like us (app publishers) will stay away from the multiple choices (due to cost, effort) and stick to the big guns.

It just seems like it would all be a lot simpler if the corporations just faced the fact that some kind of shakedown in the market will take place (at a competitor or standards level) and worked to leverage the apps market together now, not then.

But I’m not responsible for the Orange share price I guess!

Justin