Mumbai: Stroll around Bangalore’s The Forum Mall with the bluetooth feature activated on your mobile phone and you could receive a multitude of messages flashing discounts, offers and advertisements from the stores in the mall.
Forum turned into a bluetooth ‘hotspot’ three months ago. Malls across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune are following suit, deploying bluetooth-enabled servers to reach out to customers in a more direct and personal way than a loudspeaker and a stage in the public mall area.
Bluetooth is a technology specification for wireless communication. And bluecasting, a term used to describe direct marketing using bluetooth-enabled servers, is not new to India.
Until now, however, it has been used in a limited fashion, mostly by brands targeting the youth segment of the market. Now, bluetooth solution providers are trying to build scale for the technology with a number of applications. Wiring up malls is one of them. Companies such as Bangalore-based Telibrahma Convergent Communications Pvt Ltd, Dubai-based Outbox-Marketing Redefined Pvt Ltd and Delhi-based Phoneytunes.com are turning entire malls into hotspots, creating a single access point for tenants to market their diverse offerings to mall goers.
“We have seen an increased footfall of visitors over the last three months,” says Kirit Merani, pan-South India franchisee for the Archies Gallery. Sales at the store in The Forum Mall went up by 18 % last month, he says.
Telibrahma, which worked on the bluetooth infrastructure for Forum mall, has installed eight terminals at various points, with a centralized server to manage and distribute messages for different tenants. Each store pays the mall a fixed fee per day. Forum has entered into a three-way revenue share agreement with Telibrahma and its media buying arm Theme.
The service provider is now creating a loyalty programme for stores, where frequent visitors win special discounts. “We maintain records of number of visits by a user by tracking the unique bluetooth identifier on their handset,” says Suresh Narasimha, CEO, Telibrahma. Phoneytunes, meanwhile, is testing out in-store navigation along with marketing, at Pune’s Shipra Mall using bluetooth kiosks at the mall entrance. A user searching for a particular store will receive a message with directions and a map to guide him.
The flipside of marketing using bluetooth is that users’ handsets may be prone to mobile viruses. Cabir, released as a proof of concept virus in 2004, spread to handsets via bluetooth. In UK, where bluecasting was first introduced, marketers also faced consumer backlash for spamming. However, this has not deterred Indian companies from growing the bluetooth business.