Digital marketing and in particular the role played my mobile apps is crucial. Who would dare saying that it’s not.
Yet many firms don’t know how to articulate their digital strategies and in particular how to design successful mobile applications.
RTL radio promoted the other day a mobile app which, at first sight, seemed to be build on a superb idea. Yet, our analysis shows that it is doomed to failure.
Food spilling is a huge problem
Food spilling is a huge issue at the level of the planet. It is estimated that 41 tons of food are thrown away each …. second ! Actually, this represents 1/3 of the worldwide food production.
Can you imagine ? Only 2/3 of the production is consumed whereas 1/3 is for the bin.
This is in particular caused by the “eat-by” and “best-before” dates printed on food packaging. Consumers don’t really understand what they mean and fear to be intoxicated if they consume products kept in their fridge after those dates. This is of course completely false. The confusion created in the minds of customers was the trigger to change the law. In France for instance, a law was passed in January 2014 to ban “best-before” dates and use only “eat-by” dates.
What can a mobile app do against food spilling
If spilling is caused by the confusion and anxiety around “eat-by” and “best-before” dates, the clue is to make sure people in their food before those dates, right? Because most of use buy in large quantities and then forget during the week to eat what they bought. This was exactly the reasoning of the developers of CheckFood, a mobile app that helps you remember what you have bought and sends you an alarm when the deadline is approaching.
Once you have installed the app on your smartphone, you have to scan the products when you come back from the supermarket and enter the eat-by date for each and every product. The app will keep an eye for you on what’s in your fridge and will make sure you get reminders and don’t miss the deadlines.
Why this mobile app will fail
There are several reasons why this app will fail. All those reasons concur to a design issue. The app is not designed to make the life of the consumer easier. Actually it solves an issue (spilled food) by adding even more pain to the purchase process. Who wants to spend time scanning all products (and entering a date manually) for each product when he/she comes back from the supermarket ? The best you can expect is that you’ll touch a very thin segment of anti-food-spilling activists. But you’ll never be able to make a real difference because this app doesn’t address the real behavioral problem : habits. Consumers have habits and the only way to make sure your mobile app (or you innovation in general) is adopted and used, is to tap into those habits. Consumers will not change their habits for you! You have to adapt your innovation to make sure that it can be “inserted” in your consumers’ routine without much adaptation.
How to turn this app into a success?
The main problem of CheckFood can be solved through a revamping of their business model. The scanning should NOT be done by the customer. It should be done by the cashier or by the consumer while in store.
The data should be in any case captured in store and CheckFood should change its business model from “developer of mobile app for the end-customer” to a company which helps capture new in-store data. How loyal and satisfied would you be, if your store would manage food spilling for you ? Can you imagine the business avenues and marketing power a retailer would have if he’d been able to extend its relation with you up to into your house ?
Posted in Innovation, Marketing.
