Tapping the market
Right now most of the hype around NFC (near-field communication) centres on the mobile wallet, and paying for things using your smartphone. But Nokia reckons we might be missing a trick in obsessing about a technology that is still years away from becoming useful.
So today we spoke to Rupert Englander, head of services sales and marketing for Nokia UK and Ireland, to find out about a new initiative from Nokia called the NFC Hub. This isn't so much a technology as a commercial portal and back-end, allowing companies to take advantage of some of the other opportunities NFC presents.
"There's a far greater opportunity to drive incremental revenue opportunities outside of payments," said Englander. The long and short of it is that NFC facilitates spontaneous, impulse-driven interactions due to the simplicity of its use. It requires almost no effort to tap an NFC touch-point with your phone and initiate some kind of relationship with a company.
This is especially useful for marketing campaigns that strive to get end-users to interact with the brand. The NFC Hub website lists the most popular campaigns and they all focus on social media. A typical campaign would implore or incentivise to tap an NFC ad, which would mean they instantly ‘like' the brand on Facebook. The brand is then free to subject the end-user to whatever further propaganda it chooses.
Here's JD Cycles, living the NFC dream.
While Nokia is driving this initiative, it's not restricted to Nokia phones. It uses an open NFC standard, and is compatible with Android and BlackBerry phones, although they do have to have an NFC chip, of course. While the minority of phones qualify right now, Englander pointed us to forecasts from Strategy Analytics that have that number growing rapidly.
Nokia's approach to this seems to be that NFC has a lot of potential, and someone's got to get the ball rolling, so it might as well be them. "We're not trying to own this space - NFC is still at an early stage," said Englander. If that's the case, then Nokia deserves a pat on the back for trying to get things going.
