Near Field Communication offers new retail opportunities for beauty brands, as Niklas Bakos explains
Was it only two years ago that Macy’s in New York was lauding the use of the QR code in a campaign aimed at promoting Bobbi Brown make-up? At the time this seemed so very innovative, going in the store, scanning the QR code which took you to a video of Bobbi Brown herself explaining how to achieve the ‘smoky eyes’ look. According to Martine Reardon, Executive Vice President of Marketing for Macy’s, the success of this high tech experiment took them all by surprise.
Now let’s fast forward to 2013 and QR codes are still very much in evidence. But a newcomer is edging them out into oblivion. Actually Near Field Communication (NFC) is no real newcomer; it has been around since the 1980s when it first emerged in the contactless payments arena, and it is still growing in this sector as consumers increasingly feel more comfortable about
e-wallets. As a marketing tool, however, NFC is still very much at the early adopter stage, yet it has all the potential to transform the way marketers deliver their brand story. The content, embedded in an NFC tag, allows wireless communication when a user touches a mobile device to a piece of marketing collateral. As far as user experience is concerned, the magic lies in the delivery – a mere tap suffices to download content or effect a transaction.
Just like QR codes, NFC has the capacity to leverage content from just about anywhere. QR codes, however, take seven or more steps to direct users to the digital marketing content, while NFC will unlock content with a simple tap of an NFC enabled device.
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